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Just realized how much a bad SATA cable can mess with drive speeds
I was troubleshooting a client's slow boot times for a couple hours last Tuesday. Turns out a cheap SATA cable from a 5 year old build was dropping from SATA III to SATA I speeds. Swapped in a new 49 cent cable and their drive instantly hit 550 MB/s again. Has anyone else seen weird slow downs from old cables like that?
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averywright15d ago
Oh man, I read somewhere that those old cables can actually degrade over time, not just from wear and tear but from the cheap copper oxidising inside the connector. There's a guy on a hardware forum who tested a bunch of random cables from 2010 with a multimeter and found intermittent connection losses on almost half of them. It makes sense, a bad connection will trigger constant renegotiation and drop the speed back to SATA I just to keep a stable link. I've seen it a few times with client builds, always the super thin flat cables from cheap cases.
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sageallen15d ago
Honestly feels like one of those things that gets way overblown online.
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