Keep your SATA connectors clean!

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FlyingPenguin
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Keep your SATA connectors clean!

Post by FlyingPenguin »

I've been having problems with my home file server the past few weeks. Network file transfer speeds plummeted from around 100 MB/s to 10MB/s.

Spent the day experimenting:

- Noticed that one of the server's cores was pegged at 100% during network file transfers or even SATA to SATA file copying.

- File copying SATA to SATA was also very slow.

- By repeatedly copying different large files from the server to the workstation I noticed that the transfer speed did start around 60MB/s but then rapidly deteriorated down to 10 MB/s.

- There are 3 drives on my server: BOOT, MEDIA, MEDIA MIRROR (the media drive gets synced to the Media Mirror once a week using Allway sync). All the network shares are on the MEDIA drive but as an experiment I shared a test folder on the BOOT and MEDIA MIRROR drives and both those drives had normal network transfer rates of around 100MB/s.

I figured I had a bad drive, or a bad SATA port or a bad SATA cable, but the first thing I did was clean each of the SATA connectors on the motherboard with CRC contact cleaner. Sure enough that fixed the problem.

It's bizarre because I would have expected to see some cable CRC errors in the log or on the drives SMART data but nothing showed up.

So clean your SATA ports! :)
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Executioner
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Post by Executioner »

Living in Florida, it must be humidity? I live in the desert and never seen anything like that here since we have dry weather most of the time. Like right now @4:45PM, it's 102°F outside with a RH of 2%.
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Post by FlyingPenguin »

I have to admit, it's pretty rare. Back in the IDE ribbon cable days I would see a lot of dirty cables, but frankly I've never seen this happen before with SATA. Of course, it's always a good idea to clean your connectors every once in a while anyway.
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ZYFER
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Post by ZYFER »

The dust tends to settle, and in high humidity section, the cable tends to expand displacing the dust slightly. When you go high humidity to cooler as well, contracts slightly. It is enough to get sitting dust to move just enough to slip between the connectors interrupting the connection slightly. You shouldn't run into this much in areas that are kept at a constant temperature.
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normalicy
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Post by normalicy »

Oddly, I can only think of a couple times when I've had cable issues.
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