Question Testing a sata drive bay

[pcm81]

I have a 5 bay chassis for swappable sata drives. It connects to MOBO via 5 sata cables and has molex connectors for power. Served me well for 10 years. Recently i had seagate drive fail in one of the bays, then a replacement drive started to develop bad sectors in the same bay. For now i stopped using that bay, but would like to test it to see if the bay is failing, resulting in dead drives... How can i test the bay under linux without killing more drives?

Thanks

 

[solidsnake1298]

I have a hard time believing that two drives would fail in the same bay. It might be worth connecting those "bad" drives directly to your computer to double check that they are actually bad. With a different SATA cable. It is possible that the SATA cable for that bay has gone bad. I had almost this exact same experiences with a hot swap bay in a previous case I owned (Corsair Obsidian 800D). It turned out to be a bad SATA cable and that 2 HDDs I thought were bad were just fine (still using them to this day).

As far as testing that bay with some sort of diagnostic program, if it is a "dumb" drive bay there isn't anything to test without a hard drive connected to it.

 

[aigomorla]

normally id agree but if its seagate and you swaped with another seagate, i would not hold it against the possibly you got 2 bad seagate drives, as they are utter GARBAGE in terms of reliability.

You can always retest the second drive on its own sata cable and power cable without putting it inside the Backplane enclosure.

You just need a molex Y splitter and a Molex to sata cable, and just pull the sata cable on that port to the drive directly.

you should also as solid suggest try a different sata cable as it could be bad, and make sure all sata ports are firmly secured.