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?

Solution 1

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 $0.50?

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 diagnostics. 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 replacement 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, leave the new one, and test for other issues.

Solution 2

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.

Comments

[Admin]

Oh sorry I was meant to ask this on Superuser. Can somebody with sufficient reputation migrate this over, please?

[Alex S]

There are times we dont know if new or old cables are faulty or something else is. So, can you share how to figured out if they are faulty

[Imran Juma]

Because bad SATA cables can damage hard drives that's why...

[Imran Juma]

I found another one: warehousecables.com/cgi-bin/… if this tenma is too cheap for somebody. It's hard to believe but these are the two available products worldwide. I found a few multitesters, which test sata too, but I guess they are PSU testers. So yes, if you want to test sata data cables, then these two are the only options. In comparison there are countless utp cable testers. Can you confirm, that this Tenma tester is for data cables and not for power cables?

[Gus Neves]

Because I have 20 cables laying around and I am not sure if they are all good when I use them? Because my SSD is with a weird behaviour and I want to eliminate the cable as a cause?