I think I've solved my Spin Retry Count problem

I have stated previously that I have an older drive that seems to get a
lot of Spin Retry Counts in SMART, but other than that it's rock solid:
it has outlasted a whole bunch of newer drives that were previously
giving no error messages whatsoever in SMART. Well, it looks like I've
now also solved its Spin Retries too.

Here's the older thread for reference:

comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage | Google Groups
http://groups.google.com/group/comp....n+spin+retr y

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, so I didn't want to say anything until I
saw a bit more time pass. Well, it's now the three week mark, and I
haven't seen any additional spin retries! I've also rebooted the system
quite a bit more often than I usually do in that time. HD Sentinel is
also now starting to upgrade its Health rating automatically, it had
gone down to 40% at its lowest and today it's at 52%.

I had previously suspected the IDE cables to be the culprits, so I did
change them, but that didn't help any at that time. So at that point I
began suspecting the drive itself was getting old (which it is). Looks
like now that it's going through SATA cables instead of IDE ones, that
the cables were the culprit, even with the newer IDE cables. I'm not
sure if this is endemic to IDE cables in general, or if it was just two
bad IDE cables in a row.

Yousuf Khan