Today is
finally the day that I am installing drives into my makeshift NAS, but I just discovered something very odd when I opened her up to begin surgery. One of my SATA cables that's been in use for gods-only-know-how-many years appears to have… flecks of corrosion??
Some of the grime is clearly just old dust buildup, but that pale blueish greenish color looks vaguely like the kind of acidic corrosion you'd see on the terminals of an old leaky battery. Seeing this on a SATA connector, though, makes
zero sense to me unless maybe the metal on the clip was somehow contaminated with something years ago and is just now showing the signs.
Has anyone ever seen connectors corrode like this before? Am I reading more into this than I should, and it's just greenish dust buildup? It's certainly not
mold which would be my next (but even more distant) thought.
In any case, I'm tossing this one and replacing it with one of the many spares I have in storage, but I'm very curious to understand what this is.