Re: Disk errors ...
On Wed, Jan 13, 2021 at 02:53:58PM -0800, David Christensen wrote:
I used to think "a cable is a cable, color does not matter", but I
have experienced many storage hardware issues over the years that were
caused by red SATA cables. Other readers on this list have had
similar experiences. The explanation is chemistry -- the red dye
slowly corrodes the conductors and/or contacts. Since replacing all
of my red SATA cables with black locking 6 Gbps SATA cables, all of my
storage hardware issues have been due to failed HDD's.
And I've had a heck of a lot of hard drives connected with red SATA
cables without issues, to the point that I'm more than confident to not
jump on SATA cable color as the answer to any question as well as being
reasonably confident that people pursuing this are going to end up
interpreting coincidences as strong correlations.
A more likely source of problems is the fact that the SATA connector is
actually spec'd for a really low number of cycles. If someone frequently
plugs and unplugs SATA cables there's a good chance they'll introduce
connection issues, and if someone has old cables that have been used in
a number of differnent systems there's a chance they're done. Regardless
of color. Of course if you replace an old worn out red cable with a
brand new not-red cable... Insertion cycles also might not be an issue
at all; there's a difference between what the minimum requirement is and
how robust a particular implementation is--but you can't really tell
just by looking at it. This is, however, one of the reasons that a lot
of people insist that "SATA III" cables are special even though the spec
(and testing) says that "SATA I" cables perform the same--they simply
tried a worn-out cable. Cables that were completely out of spec in the
first place probably account for the rest, but again bogus junk can come
in any color.
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