In article , Yousuf Khan
writes

Well anyway, what I did recently was that I converted two of those old
IDE drives into SATA drives using an IDE-to-SATA converter board that
fits right onto the back of the drives themselves. I started noticing
that the Spin Retries were gone about two weeks ago, but that was only a
week after I installed them

I think the change in behaviour won't have anything to do with the
cables. A dodgy IDE cable is going to affect a lot more than the Spin
Retry count.

It's probably more to do with the fact hat you have now converted the
drive to SATA. Those plug-in converters are notoriously unreliable
(especially if you buy the ebay cheapo ones). I've used several
different ones with mixed results. How do you know the SMART data is
getting through from the drive correctly, if at all?

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