Why bad cable makes drive continually active.

[jinxo]

On my IDE PATA 250GB, the HDD light always on and (very) quiet continuous
whirring sound from HDD. This was used as a system drive for WinXP and all
applications seemed to work

I reseated the cable & connectors. Now HDD light is back to normal (not on
for most of time) and the sounds of disk activity are clearer/louder.
Response times are sharper.

What sort of bad connection could do that? What activity could the the
hard drive have been doing when it was whirring?

 

[Rod Speed]

On my IDE PATA 250GB, the HDD light always on and (very)
quiet continuous whirring sound from HDD. This was used as
a system drive for WinXP and all applications seemed to work

I reseated the cable & connectors. Now HDD light is back
to normal (not on for most of time) and the sounds of disk
activity are clearer/louder. Response times are sharper.

What sort of bad connection could do that?

I eventually found that it was an intermittent short to case with the motherboard.

The reseating moves the motherboard enough to make the problem go away for a while.

 

[Yousuf Khan]

On my IDE PATA 250GB, the HDD light always on and (very) quiet continuous
whirring sound from HDD. This was used as a system drive for WinXP and all
applications seemed to work

I reseated the cable & connectors. Now HDD light is back to normal (not on
for most of time) and the sounds of disk activity are clearer/louder.
Response times are sharper.

What sort of bad connection could do that? What activity could the the
hard drive have been doing when it was whirring?

I think the PATA cables were just in over their head, too much noise on
them. I've had a set of PATA drives which I've converted to SATA and
they've been running better than ever. When they were running in native
PATA, they were getting cable errors constantly, requiring a lot of
retries. One of the drives, HD Sentinel was near to reading it its last
rites, giving it just over a hundred days to live by its calculation.
Everytime under SATA these drives get their reliability ratings upgraded
over time, as their error rates are eliminated. I think PATA cables may
have maxed out at UDMA/33, after which their error rates skyrocketed
despite manufacturer's claims to the contrary.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Grant]

I think the PATA cables were just in over their head, too much noise on
them. I've had a set of PATA drives which I've converted to SATA and
they've been running better than ever. When they were running in native
PATA, they were getting cable errors constantly, requiring a lot of
retries. One of the drives, HD Sentinel was near to reading it its last
rites, giving it just over a hundred days to live by its calculation.
Everytime under SATA these drives get their reliability ratings upgraded
over time, as their error rates are eliminated. I think PATA cables may
have maxed out at UDMA/33, after which their error rates skyrocketed
despite manufacturer's claims to the contrary.

It's having two hard drives on one PATA cable that causes problems.

Only the primary connection at end of drive gets proper signals, the
slave connection can see signal reflections, thus should be run at a
much lower rate, for example a CD/DVD drive. Joe Public never got
the message and expected two hard drives to behave properly on 80way,
well now they've fixed it the only way possible, eliminate the parallel
ribbon

Grant.

 

[bbbl67]

It's having two hard drives on one PATA cable that causes problems.

Only the primary connection at end of drive gets proper signals, the
slave connection can see signal reflections, thus should be run at a
much lower rate, for example a CD/DVD drive.  Joe Public never got
the message and expected two hard drives to behave properly on 80way,
well now they've fixed it the only way possible, eliminate the parallel
ribbon

And eliminate the shared cable.

Yousuf Khan