S-ATA design flaw - Please Read

S-ATA is very nice, I dont think that it is actually faster than P-ATA, but saving space is always nice. However, today I found out just how strong the little plugs are.

Just one slight tug on the cord, and it broke the small peice of plastic off, and bent the pins. The peice of plastic keeps the plug in place, and the pins on the cord, and HD touching eachother. Now that the peice of plastic is broken off, the cord will not stay there.

There is nothing lke good old P-ATA when it comes to durability. I dont even think it's possible to break one of those massive 40 pin things. I have learned my lesson, and I hope a good number of people read this. My lesson was learned on a $120 Western Digital Raptor.

I am calling them tomorrow. Going to say that it is a design defect since I never abused it, and actually took better care of it than the normal use. Hell, I had two 40mm fans on the bottom blowing on the PCB, and one 80mm blowing on the top of it. Not to mention regularly monitoring it's status through Speedfan.

My Maxtor 250GB is acting up too, with unreadable sectors. I think it's time to go over to Seagate.

So just to recap. You should examine your S-ATA connectors and see how they are designed. And always, always, be very careful when touching an S-ATA cable. Thank god I didn't rip the connector off of my Max3! If you thought this was helpful, please say so, that way it'll stay at the top for a while and a lot of people will avoid doing my stupid mistake.

I dont think Wdc will really care for the design faults. They will simply blaim you.
Thanks

WD will probably repair the drive if it's under warranty. I accidently pulled one of the sata plugs off the onboard controller on my first nf7-s mainboard so i know exactly what your talking about. All it took was a little tug on the cable and the connector from the mainboard came with the cable. not good.....

J.

Bummer! Maybe I don't want s-ata hard drive so bad after all.

do you mean the connectors on the drive or the connectors on the board? the ones one the motherboard are definitely wimpy, I have cracked one of those before. But the ones on the drive are solid. Try the connector that WD makes. It works very well, you can flex the cable without putting stress on the connector. As for SATA not being faster than IDE, you won't get any defense there

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/wdsc50rcw.asp?Language=en

Wait...you're complaining that SATA connectors suck compared to IDE? ... boy that's twisted.

There's nothing more agravating than bending a few IDE pins or having the end of the cable BREAK OFF WHILE STILL CONNECTED because the stupid cable is cheap and won't come off easily.

SATA > IDE

haha, the same thing happened with one of my raptors and the sata power connector. I tried to pull it out(barely used any force) and it snapped, leaving the plastic housing of the hdd attached to the sata power connector, and the metal strips that make up the connection sitting there exposed. My only option was to hand feed them back into the connector and tape the connection so it will stay in place.

Everything works fine, and I'm not going to go through the trouble of rmaing both my psu and hdd. Regardless of which is better, sata or pata, its quite true that sata connectors are very structurally weak.

Foxie3a said:

My Maxtor 250GB is acting up too, with unreadable sectors. I think it's time to go over to Seagate.

So just to recap. You should examine your S-ATA connectors and see how they are designed. And always, always, be very careful when touching an S-ATA cable. Thank god I didn't rip the connector off of my Max3! If you thought this was helpful, please say so, that way it'll stay at the top for a while and a lot of people will avoid doing my stupid mistake.

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Yes, VERY helpful, as I noticed just that today when trying different plugs.
After reading this, I will take it very slow when connecting them.

As far as your Maxtor goes, I'm on my second this week. First one started to fail while windows was updating and then sometimes the bios would see it, other times not.

Now I got a replacement, but the access times are crap and chkdsk found a few problems to fix. So I'm like

There is definately no difference in speed between S-ATA and P-ATA, atleast not from what I've seen. My 250GB is P-ATA and clears beats the raptor in all benches I've ever tried, except for write, where the Raptor dominates.

I'm talking about the connector on the hard drive. There is only a tiny peice of plastic, that's what snuggly fits into the S-ATA cord. The pins are very solid, they bend, but don't break off.

I didn't get around to calling WD in time, they're closed. I dont want to do it all online, send it, then get the same one back saying that it's my fault.

I think I am going to epoxy the peice back on there. I am going to be very busy soon. College is starting very soon, and I have a few other issues at the same time. Then later I can try to RMA it, I can always break the peice back off. lol

It's like they are making these drives to break. If WD doesn't replace it for free, I'm never getting another Raptor. It's under warranty until 2008.

I disagree with your statement that the speeds of SATA and PATA are the same.
1xMaxtor 160GB PATA - Avg. Read: 50MB/s
2xMaxtor 160GB SATA - Avg. Read: 110MB/s (on RAID 0)

If that's not significant to you, then you're correct in saying there is no difference. But that's over twice as fast.

theblt said:

I disagree with your statement that the speeds of SATA and PATA are the same.
1xMaxtor 160GB PATA - Avg. Read: 50MB/s
2xMaxtor 160GB SATA - Avg. Read: 110MB/s (on RAID 0)

If that's not significant to you, then you're correct in saying there is no difference. But that's over twice as fast.

Click to expand...

That's twice as fast, and double the amount of hard drives! But there was a 5mb/s gain. Then again, you have to remember that they might be comparing older P-ATA drives, to brand new models that have S-ATA.

P-ATA itself is supposed to be 133mb/s. Not that either P-ATA or S-ATA get anywhere close though.

theblt said:

I disagree with your statement that the speeds of SATA and PATA are the same.
1xMaxtor 160GB PATA - Avg. Read: 50MB/s
2xMaxtor 160GB SATA - Avg. Read: 110MB/s (on RAID 0)

If that's not significant to you, then you're correct in saying there is no difference. But that's over twice as fast.

Click to expand...

:blank stare: You're comparing Read speed of one setup and another that is virtually identical, except it's Raid 0. Of course it's going to read faster. Regardless, 110 is still less than 133 which is less than 150....

Foxie3a said:

There is definately no difference in speed between S-ATA and P-ATA, atleast not from what I've seen. My 250GB is P-ATA and clears beats the raptor in all benches I've ever tried, except for write, where the Raptor dominates.

Click to expand...

Use a clock. A Raptor is faster and you don't need software to tell you.

I like the design concept of the SATA but you are right about the plugs being weak. I have had to tape the plug in place on several setups so that the cable doesn't want to pop off the back of the drive.

tom10167 said:

Use a clock. A Raptor is faster and you don't need software to tell you.

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Raptor is a 10,000 RPM drive. There weren't any of those for P-ATA, so of course it should be faster.

I can definately feel that my P-ATA drive is faster at reading than my S-ATA is. Copying from from the P-ATA to S-ATA is a lot faster than copying files from the P-ATA to S-ATA.

I'm still sticking with my "theory" that the S-ATA drives are only faster because they are newer models, and even then some P-ATA are beating S-ATA.

umm its called computer parts weren't exactly built w/ big durability in mind lol. Computer componants are delicate hardware.

jcw122 said:

Computer componants are delicate hardware.

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mines not i play football ( soccer ) with mine lol

i dont know think SATA is slower but my 200Gig Maxtor PATA drive is one fast drive

jcw122 said:

umm its called computer parts weren't exactly built w/ big durability in mind lol. Computer componants are delicate hardware.

Click to expand...

Hard drives certainly were...if not then they would fail when turned upside down. A hard drive is an excellently designed peice of hardware.

I've had no problems with the SATA plugs. Maybe I'm just lucky.

heh, my only issue is when it comes disconnected. Gosh Darn you stupid SATA Cables!

(I'm buying the nice one with locks pretty quick )

Elif Tymes said:

(I'm buying the nice one with locks pretty quick )

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Where can you get a nice one with locks?