Where to get Good SATA cables?

[Nic_s]

Normally I buy from wootware as they are just around the corner from me, but they seem to only have stock of the normal generic cables that all the local tech stores seem to stock. Wootware has not had stock of the Corsair cables for some time now and they may not be able to get more. Because wootware is so convenient, I rarely even look for other places that sell hardware. I already know that most if not all local stores will only have the generic stuff which is normally the ZA way...

Anyone know where else I can get good quality SATA cables either online or somewhere in the Cape Town area?

EDIT: Just remembered about loot.co.za and they have some lian-li and corsair cables. I always forgot about loot. That said, I would like to be able to get some this week still if anyone knows where I can get some.



For those interested in why...
I've been working on setting up a Proxmox hypervisor on my old AMD rig and got a brand new Samsung 250Gb SSD for it. I'm not planning on doing anything crazy... just a NAS VM and another VM for... err... stuff, but in no way am I going to be doing crazy writes to this SSD. After I've done the Proxmox setup and was busy doing the installation for the first VM, I got an error while writing to the SSD. Basically, data got corrupted before it could be written on the SSD and the SATA link had to be re-initiated. At least this is what I think is happening... far from an expert here. Everything was working though... no crashes or lock ups. This seemed weird and after checking the SMART data on the drive there was a CRC error logged on the drive for each time there was the SATA link error.

After some time on google it seemed most people found that the SATA cables were the issue. I changed out the SATA cable twice using my "nice" cables, but each time the errors would come up and each time it would log a CRC error on the drive. That was an entire day lost.

This morning I redid the setup on an old HDD from an old laptop using the exact same power and SATA cable and I got zero errors. So not the software. At this point I was worried something was wrong with my brand spanking new SSD. So I put the SSD back and still got the same errors.

I then pulled out an old generic no name cable that I've never used, so brand new, and used that with the SSD and so far... no errors. So with my bad "nice" cables the HDD was fine, but the SSD was not.

I think my bad "nice" cables may not be insulated properly and they are quite old. As a result the signal integrity on the cable may suffer from interference when having to deal with high throughput when using an SSD, but with the low throughput of an old HDD it seems to not be an issue.

I've never seen this before, but I've recently lost an 128Gb ssd and I think it was using one of these "nice" cables. From my research online, I know that if a VM gets too many of these errors they can become completely corrupt. My old ssd failed by being stuck in readonly mode and I could only recover data from it using Linux... maybe it was a bad cable, not sure.

So now I want some better than the normal generic cables even if it's just for piece of mind.

 

[Phence]

Sorry TLDR, I think you shouldn't worry and just use whatever cable. I've run Proxmox on Intel i3 NUCs, desktop PCs, old M.2 and 2.5" drives etc.

Don't get hooked like those audio nutters on oxygen free cables, SATA cable is SATA cable.

Though there are very nice Supermicro and Silverstone cables which are nice for small spaces/bends that look like this. Supermicro should be the best quality stuff locally as it's used in servers if you believe there is a difference in quality.

Supermicro ACC - Cable 4X SATA 70/59/48/38CM

The Supermicro CBL-0180L-01 enables SATA 4 round straight-right angle connections for storage. This cable is compliant with T10 and SFF standard and is verified with Supermicro servers,

www.geewiz.co.za