> I discovered, amidst great initial pain, that most, if not all, of the > problems I had with SATA disks were caused by SATA cables and not by > the disks themselves. Intermittent problems, such as disks randomly > not showing up in RAID groups, were solved when I replaced the cables > with proper ones. Some of the bad cables even came from well known names. Coincidence or not, all of the cables I had problems with were of the same general type: thin and covered with wrapped aluminum foil. I don't think I ever had problems with the flat, wider ones.