Why Do SATA Drives Suck?

Matthew on 2/4/2009 at 09:51

It probably means that the motherboard allows you to utilise dual-channel RAM, which allows each memory module access to the memory controller, increasing throughput bandwidth. Not by a huge amount for games, but it can help for other applications. You're best to put identical RAM modules into the corresponding slots.

Master / slave drives are only relevant if the drive is a PATA drive; SATA drives are basically all 'masters'. The mulitcoloured cable is most likely a molex or SATA power cable, whilst the blue one is probably the data cable.

Inline Image:

http://i165.photobucket.com/albums/u73/Matthew_Morrison/115629-2206P164_1B.jpg

The top cable is a PATA data cable, the bottom is a SATA data cable. And for good measure, a molex power connector:

Inline Image:

http://i165.photobucket.com/albums/u73/Matthew_Morrison/800px-Molex_female_connector.jpg

And a SATA power cable:

Inline Image:

http://i165.photobucket.com/albums/u73/Matthew_Morrison/sata15pin.jpg

Renzatic on 3/4/2009 at 03:18

I have a Coolermaster iGreen 600w. That's a fairly decent power supply. Not up there with the likes of Corsair and it's ilk, but stout nonetheless.

Little status update. The new drive arrived and I've already got most everything ported over. Of course I couldn't do things the easy way. The old drive seemed to be too damaged to clone, so I had to reinstall Windows and do the good ole drag and drop method. The new drive, with most of my files ported over, somehow ended up 5 gig larger despite the fact I didn't have all my programs installed. With that much damage, I'm surprised the thing was still remotely usable.

The only bad news is WD sent me a got-DAMN recertified drive. Some customer service bitchery looks likely in my near future.

Judith on 3/4/2009 at 08:53

Sorry to hear that you have such severe HDD problems, I had a few HDD drives in my PC but not even one ever died on me, just reported some bad sectors. But that was some really old WD. I'm actually using Maxtors and luckily haven't got any problems with those :) I used both ATA and SATA ports and everything was/is fine to this day. Maybe it's a motherboard problem? I know that you rather buy high quality stuff, but sometimes people try to save off money on that, while it's the heart of the system.

Btw. I don't know how good or bad Ascrock is today, but I remember they we're releasing really cheap and crappy mobos a few years back. My friend had a lot of trouble with those, I would rather pay a bit more and get some MSI, Asus or Gigabyte.

Renzatic on 4/4/2009 at 21:44

From what I understand, Asrock is just an experimental/budget sub of Asus. Sometimes they have good boards, most of the time not. The particular board I bought was one of their big successes, a little $100 thingy that matched the Nforces out at the time in terms of performance.

I bought it because, at the time, I wanted to save some money and stick with my AGP card, and the 939 DualSATA2 was about the ONLY board in existence that had perfectly functional AGP and PCI-e slots without any sacrifices in power. It was a pretty dumb of me ultimately, because I ended up getting a 7900GT the day after I got it. Still, besides my harddrives dying, I haven't had a single problem out of my computer the entire time.

Jadon on 7/4/2009 at 09:03

why the Hitachi hate? i have three (1 80GB IDE, 1 80GB SATA, 1 250GB SATA) with the oldest being 5yrs old and the newest 2yrs, never had a problem. :erg:

i must be an oddity.

abbydabbydoo on 6/10/2009 at 20:44

We have been seeing a lot of sata drives in our shop lately that are completely hosed. Each time we get to the bottom of things these drives have been completely hosed as if there was never anything on them including a boot partition.

We work on all kinds of computers, including our own custom builds there doesn't seem to be a common MFG like the Maxtor fiasco.

It's getting to the point that I am feeling increasingly skeptical about the reliability of the sata drives. I for one am personally sticking to my IDE drives.

Today's dead drives, both machines that are either less than 1 year old are just around that time.

10/6/2009

1. Found in HP Pavilion Desktop a6512p - still under warranty. Customer reports that this machine was on surge protector at all times.
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500 Gig (ST3500620AS) Firmware HP24, PN: 9BX144-621, Date Code 09021, Site Code: TK, Product of Thailand.

2. Found in Acer Laptop ZR1, Aspire. This drive is a Western Digital WD1600B EVS - 22USTO, 160 Gig, PN: WD1600BEVS-22USTO, Date 10 Aug 2008, DCM FBCT2BBB.

Both drives above, completely hosed and shorting out computers that they are attached to.

scarykitties on 6/10/2009 at 21:26

But don't IDE drives have huge bandwidth limitations that SATA ones don't?

I definitely wouldn't buy an SATA drive above 750 Gb or so. I've heard that the 1 to 1.5 Tb ones have a tendency to crash.

heywood on 6/10/2009 at 22:21

Quote Posted by Jadon

why the Hitachi hate? i have three (1 80GB IDE, 1 80GB SATA, 1 250GB SATA) with the oldest being 5yrs old and the newest 2yrs, never had a problem. :erg:

i must be an oddity.

As long as they keep selling drives under the name Deskstar, people are going to continue to think Deathstar. I don't know why they haven't ditched that name.

I had two of the 75GXP in a RAID configuration and until SATA drives came out they were the only drives that ever failed on me. Now, over the last few years I've had a string of bad luck: 1 Samsung which suddenly couldn't get past POST, 1 Western Digital that just kept accumulating bad blocks until I didn't trust it anymore, and 2 recent Seagate Barracudas with head crashes. To be fair to the Samsung, I think it may have just been a power supply problem.

It could be that my luck is bad, but too many people are reporting too many hard drive problems these days. Reading forum posts and customer reviews on sites like NewEgg leads me to believe that quality has gone to hell. Hard drive failures were just not this common 10 years ago.

Renzatic on 12/10/2009 at 17:31

Like what was mentioned before, I'm sure those flaky barely-on SATA dongles are most to blame here. A few months back, I picked up a clipped right-angled SATA cable that fits nice and snug on the port. So far...knock on wood...my new HDD hasn't given me any troubles.

If there is one thing I'm definitely sure of, my next primary drive won't be SATA. Right now, I'm eyeing one of the new PCI-E SSD drives. I'm not too sure of the disadvantages yet, like will the BIOS identify it as a proper drive, can it conflict with any other PCI-E devices, its average drive life, ect ect. But no matter what, max 800MB read/750MB write is screamingly fast enough to draw anyones attention regardless of the catches.

If it can be set as a primary bootable drive, you'll be able to load even the fattest, most bloated Windows install from post to usable desktop in a matter of seconds.

belboz on 15/10/2009 at 05:31

solid state drives is basically a special type of chip that remembers what state it was in even if you've turned the power off. so if it was set to 1 or 0 it remembers it was at 1 or 0 the next time you turn it on. So as its solid state there are no moving parts, bit like ram drives, but unlike ram drives they remember what data's been written to them even if the powers been off durring the time when data was written to them.

The only people who are likely to complain about them are the police and data recovery companies as once the data's been wiped there's no way to get it back.

The drives that failed were they manufactured in china, I've had drives from china that have failed after 6 months, although drives from taiwan seem to last years.