Pay attention to the SATA connector

Every owner of a modern personal computer knows what the SATA connector looks like. The Serial ATA serial bus (hence the name), intended for connecting optical drives and hard drives, replaced the obsolete parallel (PATA). Many still remember IDE hard drives that used wide and flat trails consisting of 40 and 80 conductors to connect to the motherboard. It can not be said that they violated the air circulation or were uncomfortable, because installation and laying were not performed every day. The reason is that the "ceiling" of the transmission speed was reached, amounting to 150 megabits per second, and the addition of additional cores to protect against mutual interference was inadvisable. As a result, another standard was proposed - SATA, which by some parameters exceeded PATA (IDE). All modern hard drives are hdd-SATA devices.

Rules for dealing with ... connectors

The serial bus bus can not be confused with anything else. This is a cable with dimensions 10x3x30 (width, thickness, length). As a rule, its shell is red (although there are models in blue, yellow and orange scales). Both sides of it have a SATA connector. Although the developers took into account some disadvantages of PATA, ignoring the rules of handling SATA loops, you can not expect stable and continuous operation of the disk subsystem. First of all, when connecting, you should carefully inspect the SATA connector on the wire: its special design does not allow an erroneous connection. The connectors on the board and the cable (sometimes referred to as the plug) must match the internal protrusions. Conclusion: excessive effort is unacceptable. Few people know that the SATA connector does not involve frequent on / off cycles. The internally mounted contacts are thin, curved (spring-loaded) copper strips, which, when connected, gives a qualitative electrical contact. With frequent switching, the clamping force is reduced, which can lead to data transmission failures. Conclusion: you need to use a special solution - eSATA or, if there is no other way out (as in the case of laptops), SATA-usb converters, which allow connecting devices not to the serial ATA bus, but USB.

Unclear drawback

Some users are already faced with the fact that sometimes a SATA device completely stops functioning for obvious reasons or there are various transmission failures (from errors to slowdown). One of the reasons is that the connectors of the loop and the board are disconnected. It is possible to restore the operability by removing and re-enabling the loop. However, there is a more reliable solution. It is necessary to purchase such a SATA cable, in which a metal latch-lock is placed on the connector. Thanks to her spontaneous disconnection is almost impossible. This train is 30-50% more expensive than usual. Some manufacturers of motherboards complete with the product offer one such cable. In general, SATA connectors are quite reliable and very rarely fail. If you follow the recommendations above, then the duration of their operation is the same as the entire board.