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Thursday 20 January 2011

Check your Sata cables

Over the past couple of months, my main Windows 7 work PC has been plagued by intermittent freezes, accompanied by a constantly-lit hard disk access light. After trying to isolate the cause with Resource Monitor, I've put it down to all manner of problems including Google Chrome's cache and anti-virus programs,  but nothing was able to fix it. The freezes could happen two or three times a day, or go away for a couple of days, and I would also get CHKDSK kicking in three or four times a month when the PC was rebooted. I was starting to worry that the hard disk itself was on the way out, but CHKDSK never returned any errors and the SMART monitoring status showed no problems.

In desperation, after seeing a couple of entries in Event Viewer relating to errors on a Sata port, I tried reseating the Sata hard disk cable into another port, but no luck. So then I tried using a different Sata cable, and hey presto! - the problem went away, and my PC hasn't frozen for over two weeks. Bizarre, but all I can guess is that there was some marginal problem with the cable. The moral is that it's often easy to blame software for PC problems, but never forget that anything with a bit of wire inside it can fail too.

Sata cables can fail, too





9 comments:

  1. Damn...
    I must admit that I have been having similar issues and complaining that it's the software causing it to freeze. I even reinstalled windows so that I could verify the HDD as error free right from the outset... I guess I should check the cables now, as that's about all that's left to check!
    Many thanks for the detective work - I just hope that my problem is caused by a similar issue!

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  2. @Anonymous - glad to be of help, hope it works for you. I've had no repetition of the freezing or CHKDSK problems since I changed the cable almost a month ago.

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  3. Unfortunately I am not that lucky. New cables have failed to solve the issue, and I am at my wits-end over it.
    I just installed the latest driver for my graphics card and found that Chrome worked well and my computer did not freeze at all upon restart with the new driver - until about 10 minutes later when I ran Firefox as well as Chrome, when the computer froze almost immediately for about 5 minutes. Since a reboot, it's back to the computer freezing (for at least 5 minutes) within minutes of turning the machine on, as well as for a couple of minutes at a time about 3-4 times an hour (fairly randomly).

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  4. I've been suffering from the exact same situation (I thought Chrome was the culprit as well). Thanks for such a helpful article!

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  5. I have been experiencing the same sort of issues. At times, I would even have he entire hard drive freeze where I could hear a clicking pattern and the system would stop responding. If I rebooted, it would then claim I had no boot disk. If I powered off my machine entirely, then restart, it would start working again (until the next freeze). I cleaned my computer out and the clicking/total system freezing has stopped, but the symptoms you described in your post have not gone away. I think it is time I investigate the cable.

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  6. I tried everything and still had the problem. I swapped out my sata cable and that seemed to help, but not enough for me to call it fixed. Ultimately, I left the new sata cable attached and then ended up turning off the Windows Search service. That seems to have cured it fully. Thanks for the bad cable idea. I am adding that to my troubleshooting toolbox!

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  7. I have been plagued by this freezing for some time now. It is not limited to Chrome. In fact, I started using Chrome because it would happen often with Firefox and in the beginning Chrome was not affected at all. Outlook was another major offender, but I don't use it any more. But the problem is not necessarily connected with applications that I run--it sometimes happens when I'm booting up. There are lots of reports of this freezing if you google it, but I haven't yet found a solution that works.

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  8. with a nasty mainboard like that a faulty sata cable is the least of your worries

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  9. That wasn't the board, it's an old archive photo from a workshop I did.

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