I seem to be plagued by such basic issues it makes my head hurt.

I purchased three SATA cables from Scan (LN35962), now there's a DVD+/-RW, a 1TB Western Digital Blue and a 250GB Samsung 840 EVO, all very straight forward and basic.

The cables do not appear damaged, no breaks in the sheath of the cable, they haven't been stretched, or bent around tight angles.

The devices listed above appear correctly in BIOS, and I can even load up Windows installation media to begin an install of Windows 8.1 Pro, but that's when the problems start, it sits there for around five minutes trying to find a hard drive, then it finds it and proceeds to partitioning/drive selection, if you select any drive, either the SSD or the WD Blue, it fails to create a partition and displays an error.

I have spent the best part of two hours trying to run diskpart to clean any partitions, convert both drives to MBR (if they weren't already) and then continuing to try a Windows installation, nothing worked, I then tried running Hiren's BootCD 15.2 and tried repartitioning the drive to then be met with I/O errors, even though the drive was displaying correctly and was being detected.

I then decided to pop open the motherboard box (Asus B85M-G w/latest BIOS) and dug out the included SATA cables (which I hate using as they're usually far too short) and plugged one of them in and immediately things looked much better, the Windows install went through without a hitch, no pausing to find a hard drive, it was lightning quick and no I/O errors appeared.

I then wiped the SSD again and put the Scan SATA cable back, and the I/O errors returned.

Can SATA cables really be that hit and miss, they're rated for SATA3 / 6Gbps as are the devices I am using, I just don't want to needlessly open an RMA for three cables, there isn't really much that can go wrong, push the cable in until the locking latch clicks, do the same for both ends, power the system on, check the BIOS, make sure all devices are found and then proceed to install an operating system.

This machine is running default settings, nothing has been tweaked in BIOS, and SATA is running in AHCI mode.