SATA hard drives can burn in heck

[GrefMofovich]

Wow, of all the possible ideas for connectors, they just had to pick the LAMEST one to use didn't they? Did these monkeys learn nothing from nintendo? - broad, flat, ugly looking connectors are a BAD IDEA. unfortunately hyperventilating on the contacts doesn't fix anything in this case. but I'm really surprised the prototypes didn't tip someone off to things like: you can unplug the drive by sneezing on the cable (or on the connector), you can break the bloody thing on the mobo side forever unless you're using tweezers to insert the cable... etc, etc, and ah yes, my favorite: if the grade X plastic that usually constitutes the cable plugs happens to deform by .000001 millimeters somehow, like if you "hot plug" it once for instance, then you'll be left with a signal that breaks periodically, causing your WHOLE machine to stop dead, the drive to emit a pathetic little squeak, and then everything resumes like nothing happened, except you're that much closer to a fury-induced coronary.

Oh yeah, you can kill me now please, thanks.

-GM

[Sterling_Aug]

Bang!!!

[Peter M]

SATA-II fixes this by adding retention clamps to the cables.

Welcome to the realization that IDE has always been and will always be about CHEAP, only cheap and nothing but cheap. About reliability and performance it is not. And turning into Yoda I am.

[Midknyte]

PM aka Yoda is right. (as usual)

The new cables have little clips you have to press to remove the cable. SATA cables are much slimmer than IDE, so there isn't going to be much clamping power to begin with.

[mireland]

err hadn't noticed...seems fine to me...

[ATI RADEON 8500]

Me either.. Havent gone unplugged on me EVER.. You sure you dont have hamster running inside the case and knocking the cable out? :t

[fishybawb]

Try using a different cable if you're having problems. The one that came with my WD drive (strange for an OEM model, so I wasn't expecting the quality to be great!) didn't fit very securely, so I bought a new one and it's fine now.

[GrefMofovich]

There is a hamster, but it's trained to spin the cpu fan ONLY. I'm just saying that they could have easily made a connector resembling your common USB plug (either type), to name one of about 3259879 examples that would be more durable than nintendo-style plug. so bitter, gosh!...

[Rocketmech]

I've had SATA 2 cables get loose , well more like ajar, due to space limitations . Those narrower serial cables are thicker than IDE so they don't like being in a bind . Some connections are not as tight fitted as others , a QA issue I presume . Unfortunately it cost me 3 field trips to a clients home in the sticks to figure out the problem and install a fix , which was a right angle connecting cable on the drive. I still perfer SATA over IDE regardless of the mishap .

[Midknyte]

there are both right angle and straight sata cables with clips. you're at the mercy of the manufacturer as to which one they choose.

[GrefMofovich]

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v328/JohnsonJohnson/Web/P1000285_r.jpg

The saga of SATA evil continues, it doesn't end. :(

This time a perfectly good desktop (old mobo w/o SATA) needed a new drive. Didn't have spare IDE drives to sub in, but I do have a nifty IDE<->sata adapter for that. All seemed well after the operation. That is until the thing stopped booting up and would say "Searching for boot record on HDD0..." right before it should load the OS. Drive unplugged, re-plugged, adapter checked. The system would boot, but windows would be sluggish and/or freeze accompanied by hard drive spasms. Eventually even restarting would result in a misfire, or occasionally windows would come crashing down in a blaze.

Was it incompatibility? Driver issue? a virus?!!??!?!? Nope, it was the sata power cable. It laughs at clips, and it laughs at us all. It wasn't dislodged in any apparent way. No, it was loose laterally so that the middle contact(s) intermittently lost contact. Solution? Simply what I did in the picture there with a thing of metal from a case expansion hole. The cables in question were bought in bulk on ebay.

The idea that my hard drive stability depends on paying $30 for a 3 cent cable raises my gorge. And were I to encounter the persons responsible for the travesty called sata, I would lower said gorge all over their brand new v-neck sweaters.

-GM :mad: