Testing Speeds For Cable Faults

Rowan88 · 27 Apr 2018 at 10:00

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?

Rowan88 · 27 Apr 2018 at 10:30

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.

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.

Rowan88 · 27 Apr 2018 at 10:40

Gigabyte Z87-D3HP

When I use this program what speeds should I expect from a Crucial MX100 256GB SSD and two Seagate 1 and 2TB 7200RPM HDDs?

Rowan88 · 27 Apr 2018 at 10:46

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 · 27 Apr 2018 at 11:39

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)

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)

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?

On all three drives I have:
Enable write caching on the device - YES
Turn off windows write cache buffer flushing on the device - NO

Rowan88 · 27 Apr 2018 at 12:10

Here is the results of the tests:

C = SSD OS
S = HDD Storage 1TB
G = HDD Games 2TB

Rowan88 · 28 Apr 2018 at 12:50

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)