John B. Smith wrote:


Thanks for the theories guys. I have a little more info. Hard Disk
Sentinel says the 500G drive has
"Problems occurred between the communication of the disk and the host
57338 times."
HD Tune says these are Ultra DMA CRC Error counts.
The 1000G drive is clean of these.
I am suspicious of that SATA cable to the motherboard. I lost my
little workroom and tinkering with my computer mechanically is very
awkward now, so swaping cables is not my favorite thing to do. The
cable looks foolproof, mostly suspicious of the mb connection. I do
have a warning when this is occurring as CoreTemp tells me the 2 cores
are running 5-8% dealing with those errors
while they are happening..
At the moment the thing is running smoothly again.

If the SATA cable is bent, until it kinks the plastic,
that causes an impedance discontinuity. And that can cause
some slight reflections on the cable. The receiver has the
right resistor value to terminate the diff signaling properly,
but kinking the cable doesn't help.

You can try a nice fresh cable, and see how that works out.

The error counter for cabling problems, doesn't
reset itself. The idea is, you write down 57338 in your
notebook. Check back in a years time. If the number
is still 57338, then the new cable really works :-)

And SATA ports do blow out, because I have a failed one
on this motherboard, where the disk no longer shows up.
Now I'm down to five SATA cables.

Paul