SATA ports slowly becoming disfunctional

[wjgollatz]

It seems my SATA ports on my motherboard are slowly becoming broken. I have four ports, the first port initially worked for a while, then stopped working, that is it would only transfer at 3 mb/s, then it started to work again, now back to its slow transfer rate.

Now, it appears I am having another port go away on me with the same problem. I am not done ruling out the cause, but without any sort of discernible warning, my SATA C: drive is now exhibiting the same 3 mb/s transfer rate. I only first noticed it when trying to copy a dvd and the read buffer would not stay filled up and a 5 minute copy took over thirty minutes, HD Tuner is telling me its at 3 Mb/s and Acronis is telling me it will be 1.25 hours to backup 16 gb of data.

What could be causing the SATA ports to be failing? Is this just a symptom of a bad motherboard, or something I might be doing? The C drive has been hooked up for almost 2 months without any problems. I am asking now because I am doing virus scans and other things that will now take a long time.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Tried different cables?

 

[faxon]

ICH dying maybe? try different cables is a good call. with the number of cables you get with new mobos and HDDs these days you end up with more than you can find applications for. i have also probably tossed 4 SATA cables cause they died on me, without having to run to the store to get more on account of having a small box full of them, most of which havent even had the packaging removed yet lol

 

[Modelworks]

I like the size of sata cables but hate the connectors. With the old ide I knew when I plugged something in it was connected. With even the best sata cables it always seems questionable. So swap the cables.