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The copper traces are cold deformed and stretched making them prone to cracking. I just slap in a new one and whatever they never return usually. Heat treating them to relieve the stress in the copper may also help.
I was thinking something along those lines. Copper gets very brittle. I rarely have HD cables return.
I have noticed that failure rates for (presumably) old part # 821-1480 are much higher than the 821-2049 (suspected newer part number to correct issue). Maybe apple attempted to correct the issue.
I am going to bump this topic back alive. I might have missed another post similar - but I wanted to know, what is the best replacement cable to use when swapping a dead 821-1480 out. I remember once Luis mentioning the "so and so year model cables never have an issue and can replace these" in a YT video, but which video - no idea.
vibration + sandpaper-like aluminum case + pressure from HDD + 40-50°С = short circuit, slowly burns dataline or +5v.
i repaired 4 devices with this issue a few years ago, no one returned.
you either install SSD or put insulation tape under the cable, that's it.
there are thousands of different notebooks with more than 90 degrees bends. almost every PC laptop has full 180 bends on keyboard cable and it usually works much longer than Apple SATA snowflake. bending simply does not compute.
So i finally got my hands on this shitty SATA cable. I removed the insulation tape with a heat gun and well... it looks like the whole cable is made from pure copper which probably half-breaks the moment apple bends it for the very first time.
No it is a metallurgical problem. Copper that is cold deformed has internal stress in it and without annealing it it will in some cases start to crack to releive the stresses. Copper/brass are very prone to this problem and it is known. It is also referred to as stress-corrosion, common anywhere where copper is bend without annealing it.