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TIL those old IDE ribbon cables can actually fail in the middle of a transfer and corrupt the whole drive

I was digging through some old parts last week, found a 40-pin IDE cable from 2004, hooked up a client's old PATA hard drive to recover some photos for them, and after 15 minutes of quiet reading it just started throwing random CRC errors, and it turns out that crumpled middle section from being shoved in a box for 12 years had a broken wire that only showed up under load.

2 comments

2 Comments

the_olivia1mo ago

And that's the thing about old ribbon cables, the insulation gets brittle and the wires snap internally without any visible damage, so you'd never know until you try to actually move data. The worst part is you can't even tell by looking at it, it'll look fine but then you get that sinking feeling when the drive starts clicking differently.

terrywilson1mo ago

Funny how that's the way everything fails these days... looks perfect on the outside, broken on the inside.