How to diagnose a failing SATA port

[aviat72]

My main rig has two SSDs in RAID0 and 4 Hard Disks in a RAID10 all on the Intel Controller on the ASUS P8P67 Pro. The motherboard was replaced after the Intel SandyBridge chip-set issue.

One of the disks in the HD array started failing (SMART errors). I had an unused cold-back-up hard disk which I plugged in to replace the failing disk. The IRST rebuild the array.

After a few days, one of the disk in the array failed again. And guess what, it was the new disk I had put in the same SATA port is failing.

I have a suspicion that instead of the disk it is perhaps the port which was failing.

What would be the recommended way of debugging this problem?

 

[drescherjm]

What were the smart errors? Bad sectors will not be caused by a bad SATA port however seeing an increasing "UltraDMA CRC Error Count" would be a sign of a SATA port problem.

 

[aviat72]

Well the new disk is not showing SMART errors on boot (unlike the last disk).

However IRST is showing that the disk is not working properly and the RAID array is degraded. Resetting the disk back to fixed resulted in the same error after a few minutes. That is why I feel it is likely the SATA port which is causing the problem.

 

[drescherjm]

I would take the disk out. Plug it into a non raid SATA port and look at the SMART with a program like CrystalDiskInfo. This is so easy to do and it will eliminate the guessing..