Testing Speeds For Cable Faults

Rowan88

Rowan88

Rowan88

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Hi,

Is there a way I can run a test to see which of my SATA cables or even the ports on my motherboard are faulty? I am 99.9% sure the HDD/SDD are fine, its just my cables, but even though I have the hard drives showing and working in windows, little notions of freeze ups and slow reading makes me think the cables are at fault.

I may just be unlucky and have about 3-4 cables all faulty, but how can I test this?
 
Sometimes it's not the cables as such, but poor latching on the SATA plugs.

For example, I find the Gigabyte supplied SATA cables don't have the best plugs, and prefer the Akasa Super Slim cables as the latching on them appears very positive.
 
JasonM said:
Sometimes it's not the cables as such, but poor latching on the SATA plugs.

For example, I find the Gigabyte supplied SATA cables don't have the best plugs, and prefer the Akasa Super Slim cables as the latching on them appears very positive.
Click to expand...
Are you talking about when they are plugged in the wiggle room? I notice on the motherboard I can move them quite a bit up and down, but I didn't think that would have made an impact :(

Is there a way I can test this then? See if my read/write rates improve if the cables were pushed further upwards.
 
Have you checked the disk health? Something like https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/ will show you the drive's smart health info, but will also display SATA link speeds (in case a faulty cable is dropping to a slower speed for some reason).

What motherboard are you using? Some boards have more than 1 sata controller, and some of the ports are sometimes noticably slower/worse (e.g. non-intel controller chips)
 
Rowan88 said:
Are you talking about when they are plugged in the wiggle room? I notice on the motherboard I can move them quite a bit up and down, but I didn't think that would have made an impact :(

Is there a way I can test this then? See if my read/write rates improve if the cables were pushed further upwards.
Click to expand...

Yes i'm talking about the wiggle room, have no idea how you would test however. When I have had an issue with sata plugs the drive has just disappeared from the system.
 
I installed that program, all drives health's are GOOD and the temperatures are 30.

However I do not see "Sata link speeds".

UPDATE: Ignore me I downloaded CrystalDiskInfo and not CrystalDiskMark *facepalm*

What speeds should I be expecting?
 
Rowan88 said:
Gigabyte Z87-D3HP
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Should be no difference between ports then as they are all sata 6gb/s on the same intel controller (unlike some older boards)

Rowan88 said:
When I use this program what speeds should I expect from a Crucial MX100 256GB SSD and two Seagate 1 and 2TB 7200RPM HDDs?
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Rowan88 said:
IHowever I do not see "Sata link speeds".
Click to expand...

On CrystalDiskInfo it should list the interface as "Serial ATA" and then under that the Transfer Mode (which should be "SATA/600" for your SSD, and could be "SATA/600" or "SATA/300" for your hard drives - depending on the exact age/models of them - it's unlikely to be "SATA/150" unless they are really old drives, or there is a problem)


EDIT:
Another thought - what mode is the SATA controller set to in the bios? For best performance it should be set to AHCI (rather than Compatible, SATA, IDE or anything else)
 
Armageus said:
On CrystalDiskInfo it should list the interface as "Serial ATA" and then under that the Transfer Mode (which should be "SATA/600" for your SSD, and could be "SATA/600" or "SATA/300" for your hard drives - depending on the exact age/models of them - it's unlikely to be "SATA/150" unless they are really old drives, or there is a problem)
Click to expand...
All three of the drives show as SATA 600.

EDIT:
Another thought - what mode is the SATA controller set to in the bios? For best performance it should be set to AHCI (rather than Compatible, SATA, IDE or anything else)
Click to expand...
On the BIOS the SATA mode is AHCI. The only things I seen that were disabled was "hot plug" and "external sata".

JasonM said:
Do you have write buffering enabled for the drives in device manager?
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On all three drives I have:
Enable write caching on the device - YES
Turn off windows write cache buffer flushing on the device - NO
 
As far as testing the hard drive, it's always a good idea to use a manufacturer-supplied testing software (ours would be SeaTools) because who better understands a drive and its' firmware than the people who made the drive? Also, in the event any drive comes up with errors/RMA is needed, typically manufacturers will require you to scan the drive with their own software as part of the process anyways.

Typically a sign of a bad SATA cable is the drive vanishing/disappearing & reappearing. There is a tool called a SATA continuity tester.
 
Thanks for all the replies.

I will buy some extra SATA cables as a precaution but the HDD/SDD seem to be working fine at the moment.

Was just weird glitched like:

1) Opening a RAR file would freeze for about 5secs before showing me the contents
2) Sometimes when W10 boots to desktop the icons wouldn't show (just white papers)
 
Rowan88 said:
Thanks for all the replies.

I will buy some extra SATA cables as a precaution but the HDD/SDD seem to be working fine at the moment.

Was just weird glitched like:

1) Opening a RAR file would freeze for about 5secs before showing me the contents
2) Sometimes when W10 boots to desktop the icons wouldn't show (just white papers)
Click to expand...

It could still be a driver issue, I would be temped to install intel RST drivers above.
 
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