Spent the last two evenings hunting down a problem with my system...

[kev]

and it turns out I HAVE A FAULTY SATA CABLE on one of my HDD's. Wtf, & damnit :zombie: Whipped it out, new one in and hey presto, back into super speed transfers and no more BSODs

Moral of the story- never under-estimate these evil fuckers:

 

[TheDriller]

fuck that shit.

for reference, can you describe the symptoms of a faulty SATA cable for us?

 

[kev]

Aye! Suspiciously slow transfer speeds, topped off with Blue screens of death!

 

[Soundlurker]

I would never have suspected such a culprit. I'd have guessed it either works or doesn't.

 

[Fifth_Horseman]

I had a faulty SATA cable drive me nuts for FOUR MONTHS... random freeze ups occuring after 10 minutes to two hours. It was the cable connected to my system drive.
Bad thing was I actually did exchange the SATA cable for the audio drive two times thinking that one was the system drive, therefore didn't cure the problem. Talk about a total motivation killer.

So I really can relate to your pain, good you found it after only two days!

 

[AudioGeekZine]

Kev, what did the BSOD error code say?

 

[DevilJaw]

it is even worse trying to diagnose a bad sata controller chip.

also, other symptoms of bad cable/controller chips are large files always seem to get corrupted and they never seem to copy to another driver correctly and more easily known is after you blue screen and cant repair files, you can never complete OS installs, this is after you know the drive itself is ok. by plugging it in another computer and running appropriate drive tests.

but here is the best thing to know about diagnosing computer trouble, don't assume one symptom refers to one problem, there are a thousand possible problems for one symptom.

 

[Erkan]

Damn, never heard of a SATA cable causing any issues... but there is a first time for everything. Good thing to keep in mind... fucking computers, they're just looking for ways to fuck your life up and now I'm guarded a tiny bit better against those evil cunts, thanks to you Kev!

 

[AudioGeekZine]

I just remembered I DID have a bad cable back in December. One of my hard drives kept disappearing from Explorer, I swapped the cable and it's been good ever since.