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Gary asked: > For background and clarification purposes, since some of us are a > little out of the loop these days. What condition(s) could lead > to Async loss of signal? Is this a catastrophic condition (i.e. > unlikely but possible) or just an occasional emotional issue > (hiccup) on the interface? This could aid in the suggestion of > possible solutions. I guess I should welcome Gary to the list of "trouble makers" for asking, and of course I am the leader of the "trouble makers list", so I must answer his question... It seems that one of the dirty little secrets of SATA is how unreliable it is. I've been getting reports of all kinds of problems with SATA from my test software customers. No, I'm not going to tell you who they are or even what hardware they are running on. But to give you an idea of the problem, I started my ATACT test program running on a SATA drive 57 hours ago. So far I see 31 errors: 24 strange status errors, 5 timeout errors and 2 data compare errors. My hardware is shipping hardware anyone can buy in your local computer store. These are SERIOUS errors. The strange status and timeout errors appear to be just what Jeff is talking about - loss of communications between host and device. I have NEVER seen this kind of error rate on PATA. Running this same test software on a PATA drive might yield one UDMA CRC error over a 5 day test. The SATA error rate is REALLY REALLY *B*A*D*. Hale *** Hale Landis *** www.ata-atapi.com ***
