On 6/2/23 11:33, Stefan Monnier wrote:
And, strange as it sounds, replace any "hot red" aka "magenta" sata cable with some other color. I am a CET and known to me since the 1970's, that color of insulation dye will in time, convert the copper of the conductor into a rust colored powder, and that is a poor conductor.This is very hard to believe. I'm willing to believe that there have been insulation dyes that have proved problematic, but if you've encountered those problems in the 70s I find it *really* odd that it would still affect cables from this century (e.g. sata cables). Can you point to any evidence?
I am in the habit of cutting the connector off of bad cables (power, audio, SATA, whatever), so that I will not re-use the cable by mistake.
5~10 years ago, I cut the end off of a bad red SATA cable. To my surprise, the copper conductor was disintegrating as Gene describes. Unbelievable. Somebody botched their chemical engineering.
But a more common failure mode is mismatched SATA speed ratings. I have been using SATA since it came out and had a collection of mixed SATA I, II, and III equipment. None of the red SATA cables were marked for speed. This caused endless connectivity issues.
The solution was to remove all of the old cables and racks, and buy new cables and racks that are rated for 6 Gbps and readily identifiable. For both the chemical, identity, reliability reasons, I now buy black SATA cables with locking connectors:
https://www.cablematters.com/pc-187-156-3-pack-straight-60-gbps-sata-iii-cable.aspx https://www.cablematters.com/pc-188-156-cable-matters-3-pack-90-degree-right-angle-60-gbps-sata-iii-cable-18-inches.aspx https://www.startech.com/en-us/hdd/drw150satbk https://www.startech.com/en-us/hdd/hsb220sat25b https://www.startech.com/en-us/hdd/s25slotr David