The cables in question are these:
Aksa ProSlim
http://www.akasa.com.tw/search.php?seed=AK-CBSA05-50BK#My particular part number: AK-CBSA05-50BL
Similar ones: AK-CBSA05-50BK , AK-CBSA05-30 , AK-CBSA05-15
Photo of what is inside the cables:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/beware-of-aksa-proslim-sata-cables!-(scope-screenshots)/msg1798562/#msg1798562So i have been doing a NAS server build. Its quite a compact one totaling about 12 liters in volume but packing 4 hotswappable drive bays, full i5 quad core x86 PC and cooled by a single fan using a 3D printed airflow guide and a slightly modified heatpipe CPU cooler.
Because space is at a premium here i bought SATA cables that have particularly compact connectors on the ends because i need to do the bend quickly and 90 degree ones would get in the way due to the ports being to close on the backplane. I already desoldered the molex power connectors from the backplane due to clearance to the large CPU heatsink. And to keep things neat and tidy i bound the cables together and attached them down with a screw. Looks pretty tidy if you ask me. These fancy low profile cables cost more than the standard ones too.
Everything works nicely and im messing around with unRAID to run it all, but i start to notice some odd behavior after a while. At one point i thought i corrupted my installation so i put a fresh factory image on it and it seamed to be fine for a while. However once i added a extra parity disk to the RAID array things started getting weird again. During the array rebuild i kept getting errors, eventually they became really reproducible errors. The drives seamed to be disappearing all of a sudden and needed a power cycle before the PC would detect them again (reboot was not enough, the drives themselves needed a power cycle).
With some testing it seamed to be that this only happened reproducably when i was simultaneously writing and reading to all 4 drives in the array. I could trash the commonly failing drive as much as i wanted and it would never throw errors. Yet rebuilding 2 drives in the array where 2 are reading and 2 are writing at max speed seamed to make 1 or 2 drives fail within minutes. Then i moved the drives outside of the drive cage and used different cables and it ran fine for an hour before i gave up and called it stable. Hmm....
At this point im starting to look at my nice and tidy SATA cabling job from another perspective. What if im causing crosstalk by routing the cables so close together? I google some images of cut up SATA cables and sure enough the TX and RX pair in the cable are shielded pretty nicely, surely enough to keep such a crosstalk problem from happening. Well i do have a fast scope and differential probes so lets actually measure the crosstalk. Here is the test jig i put together where i soldered down a SATA connector and attached a active differential probe to one of the pairs.
The other end of the cable was going into the 3rd drive bay with a drive preset in it so that the end is terminated. And when the PC is off we get a nice low noise floor as our baseline.
Okay now we actually let the PC boot up so that the SATA lines start moving and... Oh DEAR LORD!!! When the drives are working and communicating there is 250 mV peak to peak of noise!!!
I have tried to disconnect the other end of the cable in case the drive was sending something back or this was noise picked up in the hotswap backplane, nope still same thing. Its only when i started pulling out drives that the noise started going down with every drive removed. This is really looking like a horrible case of crosstalk.
Okay now maybe i am picking up some common mode noise or something. These diff probes do have pretty amazing common mode rejection but they are not perfect after all. So i grab some standard SATA cables i have laying around and see what it does. I tried plugging the other end into a powered up drive, into the motherboard, into the backplane, ran it parallel to other sata cables to try and get crosstalk. In all cases it looked like the flowing photo. I was barely seeing any noise at all.
CONCLUSION:
Its pretty clear that these fancy Aksa brand cables have NO SHILEINDG AT ALL. Infact i am guessing this is simply a FFC cable wrapped in some extra insulation as i have noticed these cables are also significantly more flexible than normal SATA cables.
Do NOT buy these cables.