Anyone else do this?  You're running very reliably on the world's cheapest SATA cables and you read a post about how cable issues are a common cause of frustration.  So you order 6 bright shiny SATA 6 compatible clip-on cables and maybe three hours later the machine locks hard doing some transfers.  Completely dead, no keyboard lights. 

 

I jump start the guy and reiserfsck everything, and restart to find that my super.dat is damaged so all drives appear new.  I deal with that, get a parity check running and open a tail to syslog so I can see what's happening.  After about 3 hours I find (at least one) DRDY ERR in the log.  And it's on my parity drive's cable.  Not happening a lot, but once is more than I expected and about 20 minutes later - locked up again.  So I swapped back in one of the old cables.  We'll see how it goes.

 

Damn you Murphy - take a day off.

After about 3 hours I find (at least one) DRDY ERR in the log.

 

I believe DRDY is just an indication of DeviceReaDY, which is not useful or informative, quite normal.  ERR means the error flag is raised, and if I recall correctly, the very next line would indicate what error flag it is.  So it is the NEXT line that you are really interested in.  If you see ICRC, then that does implicate the cable, but if UNC, then there is probably a bad sector.  This page is very helpful.

I just thought it was funny that I NEVER saw it and upgraded cables to be sure of it and THEN started getting some.  The other pages generally implied it was a generally caused by cable/connector/noise and that as long as it doesn't happen a lot it's not a huge deal.  But I was trying to avoid it - and got it!

As my dad would say,"If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

 

Usually followed by much currsing and swearing by me, shortly followed by something large and heavy being thrown in his direction.