A bad SATA cable took down a whole office network today

This morning at a client site in Austin, a user's PC kept dropping off the domain. I swapped the NIC, checked the switch port, even reimaged the drive. Turned out the issue was the SATA cable between the motherboard and the boot drive, it was loose enough to cause intermittent disconnects but not enough to throw an immediate SMART error. After three hours of chasing ghosts, I swapped in a $6 replacement cable and everything stabilized. The user had mentioned the PC made a clicking sound last week, but I wrote it off as a fan. Has anyone else had a SATA cable fail in that weird intermittent way, or am I just unlucky?

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