What is the quickest way to tell whether a SATA cable is bad?

Question

To check whether a SATA cable is bad, currently I'd run a disk benchmark and look at the SMART attribute "UltraDMD CRC Error Count." However, that attribute seems to be a rolling average and may not increase immediately if you use a bad SATA cable. Can you suggest a better way?

Answer 1

I realize that this is an old question, but as it came up during a search for SATA cables, I thought I would add this. For a home user simply testing them on a working drive works just fine, but if you have quite a few cables, work IT, or take side jobs doing computer work, I highly suggest getting a dedicated SATA cable tester like the one here on Amazon, though I'd go NewEgg myself, better luck with them. Amazon SATA Cable Tester

I run a small repair/setup/teaching shop, and owning a tester for all power supply outputs and one for SATA and USB cables has saved me a ton of time and effort. It is a real pain to manually test 20+ SATA cables or power supplies.

Answer 2

Honestly I could rattle offa few tests but ultimately this question is one that begs another question. Why are you wasting valuable time running diagnostics on a cable that costs $.50. In all seriousness if you have any concern with s drive cable, change it and benchmark before and after using any reliable benchmark. If the metrics improve replace the cable, if not look into other potential causes. You will spend hours running proper diags, top quality Sata cables cost $.50 bulk, about $3.00 Retail... Unless you live in Alaska and every computer store North of Washington is out of Sata Cables, you'll waste more time, money and Effort testing the suspect cable than a dozen replacements are worth. It's an efficiency issue.

Try a new cable and compare results, If they're better, keep the new cable, worse switch back and test for other issues, same leave the new one and test for other issues.

Answer 3

It looks like one of the connections is the short SATA port. I have a Rosewill power tester that accomodates the longer SATA power connection.

As for why, they don't teach you to test cables, just secure/snug connections. Maybe in the days of IDE & SCSI data cables, this may have been true, but at 6Gb/sec, I think this is no longer the case. I have been tasked to replace HDDs only to test them later and find no faults. I am beginning to suspect cables are now more prone to fail as drives, maybe even more so. It would also be embarrassing to have a customer call back because a new drive failed because it was the cable all along. I carry extra SATA 3 cables because they are not always included with a drive waiting on-site for replacement & installation. But it would be nice to spend 2 minutes to rule out a cable before assuming it's a drive.