esata cable damaged? [closed]

Question

NOTES: I have two Sans Digital TowerRIAD they van been configured the same even the hard drives in each are the same model. This issue below has happened 3 times in 7 months. Windows 7

TROUBLESHOOTING:

Restarted computer.

--NEXT--

RIAD 1(Still NOT working)

RAID 2(Still working)

--NEXT--

RIAD 1(swap esata cables from RAID 2)

RAID 2(swap esata cables from RAID 1)

--NEXT--

RIAD 1(Works)

RAID 2(not working)

--NEXT--

RIAD 1(Works)

RAID 2(replace cable now it works)

QUESTION: I know they can be damaged by ripping them out. Can esata cables "go" bad?

Answer 1

Yes they can. Both by physical handling as without it. Moisture, thermal expansion stress, vibrations, dust etc. It could even be mechanical tolerances: a connector can work fine in one slot and not in another.

The annoying thing it may not show up immediately or in a reproducible fasion. I've had a drive cage fail randomly after hours/days of heavy workload, this was tracable to a bad connector on a sata cable.

The idea that your data will be readable again once it's send off to the disk controller is frighteningly false :(

Answer 2

All cables can go bad over time. The conditions that set this up are generally set at manufacture, with some healthy input from operating environment. Yes, they can be damaged by being yanked out. The connectors can get messed up, wires can come unseated, the plastic guides can break.

As for just going bad over time, if there was a bad wire join inside the cable, it can break after the cable has been moved enough. If the bad join was just good enough to pass good signal, it doesn't take must degradation to drop it below where the RAID card doesn't see the signal as valid.