A question for our resident genious ....Paul of course:)

Actually anyone who knows.. feel free to respond.

I am running Spinrite on a SATA drive in a laptop. Under it's S.M.A.R.T System monitor it is showing a very high count
of cabling errors (77,000) and I am only 9% complete. My question is.. since a laptop has no SATA cable, what are
cabling errors?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

This is a public, unmoderated forum.
Are you trying to make Paul look like he uses sock puppets?

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Chet home.net wrote:

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Subject: A question for our resident genious ....Paul of course
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Actually anyone who knows.. feel free to respond.

I am running Spinrite on a SATA drive in a laptop. Under it's S.M.A.R.T System monitor it is showing a very high count
of cabling errors (77,000) and I am only 9% complete. My question is.. since a laptop has no SATA cable, what are
cabling errors?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

wrote:
Actually anyone who knows.. feel free to respond.

I am running Spinrite on a SATA drive in a laptop. Under it's S.M.A.R.T System monitor it is showing a very high count
of cabling errors (77,000) and I am only 9% complete. My question is.. since a laptop has no SATA cable, what are
cabling errors?

Thanks for any help you can provide.


Actually, I have no idea. I don't use Spinrite, and
don't know what they're measuring. You may want to download
a disk diagnostic from the disk drive manufacturer, and see if
they conclude a communications problem as well.

*******

SATA interfaces use packets for communications. I understand
there is some kind of checksum on the packets, but the ability
to display the error rate is pretty rare, because I've never
seen any examples of that information being displayed. Naturally,
the packets are checked for errors, as part of the protocol,
and an errored packet would be retried. (There is no point in having
a CRC checksum, if you're not using it...) If the checksum
doesn't manage to detect a transmission error, then
errored data could be written to the disk. That is why
it's in your best interest to have a cable error rate of
zero, if you can figure it out. A bent or kinked SATA cable,
can cause such a problem, due to the impedance being screwed up.

This is from an old SATA standards doc I have on disk. So there is
some kind of scheme used. A 32 bit CRC is also used on Ethernet,
for an example of what other packet protocols are similarly protected.

" SOF FIS HOLD FIS Contents HOLDA CRC EOF
primitive Contents primitive (continued) primitive primitive"

"Maximum frame size

The 32-bit CRC used by Serial ATA can be shown to provide detection
of two 10-bit errors up to a maximum frame size of 16384 bytes. This
will provide for future expansion of Serial ATA FIS’s to a maximum
of 64 bytes of fixed overhead while still permitting a maximum user
data payload of 8192 bytes."

Generally, a measurable error rate would be a bad thing. If it
bothers you, see if there is some option to switch the drive
to SATA 1 mode (150MB/sec). Doing so, would not measurably
affect real-world performance. Desktop drives have jumpers for
this - 2.5" drives, not so much.

There may be no "cable" evident in the laptop, but the
copper tracks on the laptop motherboard are the equivalent
of a cable. An interconnect problem is one thing, but a
chip with bad driver pads (perhaps inability to reach
full amplitude) would be another excuse for the
errors you're seeing. Or, it's all bull**** (i.e. software
is reading the wrong field or whatever). I'd be more
confident in this "cable" error rate info, if
Windows performance monitor menus offered such an
item for viewing. But I've never found such an item.
And it is valuable diagnostic info - it just seems to
normally not be available. Your mention of it now, is
the first I've heard of it being accessible.

Paul

On 23 Apr 2011 15:54:23 GMT, wrote:

Actually anyone who knows.. feel free to respond.

I am running Spinrite on a SATA drive in a laptop. Under it's S.M.A.R.T System monitor it is showing a very high count
of cabling errors (77,000) and I am only 9% complete. My question is.. since a laptop has no SATA cable, what are
cabling errors?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

And what makes you think it has no cable??

On 23 Apr 2011 15:54:23 GMT, put finger to keyboard and
composed:

I am running Spinrite on a SATA drive in a laptop. Under it's S.M.A.R.T System monitor it is showing a very high count
of cabling errors (77,000) and I am only 9% complete. My question is.. since a laptop has no SATA cable, what are
cabling errors?

I believe it refers to the UDMA CRC Error Count attribute. It appears
to be telling you that there is a communications problem on the SATA
interface. Try removing and reseating the drive.

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.