Can the SATA-to-USB adapter affect the result of the bad sectors scan? ( lemmy.world )

Hi, I am planning to purchase a 2.5-inch HDD. If I connect it to my computer using a SATA to USB adapter instead of directly to the computer's SATA, can it somehow affect the result of this scan?

I apologize for my ignorance but I couldn't find an answer to this question anywhere

bruhbeans ,

Well, as I'm coming in here, I see two "no's," a "maybe" and I came to say "absolutely fucking yes" because I've lost hours to a couple cheap shitty usb-sata cables that did all kinds of weird stupid shit that immediately disappeared after I replaced the cables. So, "maybe" but "absolutely fucking yes."

remotelove ,

Did you get bad sectors? Weird things can absolutely happen but having sectors marked as bad is on the exceptional side of weird.

richmondez ,

That won't cause bad sectors though, that just means the data you were writing was bad.

Mountain_Mike_420 ,

Should be fine. Think of all the usb storage devices like senate and western digital. They all operate with a very similar adapter. The firmware on the drive should mark bad sectors not the interface that connects it.

remotelove ,

Maybe? Bad cables are a thing, so it's something to be aware of. USB latency, in rare cases, can cause problems but not so much in this application.

I haven't looked into the exact ways that bad sectors are detected, but it probably hasn't changed too much over the years. Needless to say, info here is just approximate.

However, marking a sector as bad generally happens at the firmware/controller level. I am guessing that a write is quickly followed by a verification, and if the controller sees an error, it will just remap that particular sector. If HDDs use any kind of parity checks per sector, a write test may not be needed.

Tools like CHKDSK likely step through each sector manually and perform read tests, or just tells the controller to perform whatever test it does on each sector.

OS level interference or bad cables are unlikely to cause the controller to mark a sector as bad, is my point. Now, if bad data gets written to disk because of a bad cable, the controller shouldn't care. It just sees data and writes data. (That would be rare as well, but possible.)

What you will see is latency. USB can be magnitudes slower than SATA. Buffers and wait states are causing this because of the speed differences. This latency isn't going to cause physical problems though.

My overall point is that there are several independent software and firmware layers that need to be completely broken for a SATA drive to erroneously mark a sector as bad due to a slow conversion cable. Sure, it could happen and that is why we have software that can attempt to repair bad sectors.

lemann ,

Probably not.

However, not all USB to SATA adapters support SMART, so even if there is a bad sector that gets remapped by the HDD on-the-fly (and thus does not show up in the software scan), you may not find out easily

Longpork3 ,

smartmontools has some good functionality for interfacing with SMART via usb bridges that do not provide native functionality.

hendrik ,

Not under normal circumstances. I had some issues recovering damaged harddisks that had lots of errors and retries and sometimes either the USB adapter or the mainboard SATA would crap out or handle it better. But for normal copying of HDDs, both should copy the exact same data.

Cooljimy84 ,
@Cooljimy84@lemmy.world avatar

I second this, when a drive shits the bed a sata controller handles it better, some times with a USB adapter you mess the whole bus up and need a reboot of the machine (from using them on windows experience)

just_another_person ,

What you're describing is data TRANSFER. Bad sector detection and management is done by the drive controller firmware.

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