Fried SATA port, beginning of the end?

[Bradimus]

Long story short: I want to know if my mobo is soon to be dead or if the problem is contained to the single faulty SATA port.

The story goes like this:
I've been trouble shooting my PC lately to solve why it randomly deadlocks (frozen screen, no mouse movement, no activity on caps lock). After much googling and reading I came to the conclusion that it had to a failing HDD or the motherboard. After a cleaning and more testing today I discovered that the SATA port connected to the C drive was the culprit. Before it would randomly deadlock a couple times a week, but today my PC began with not being able to find the HDD. A couple restarts later it would boot and then promptly shutdown. I tried new and known working cables with the same problem, the only resolve was moving the cable to a different port.

Its kind of a old motherboard, last bios update was back in 2015. Don't know if you need specs so here ya go for good measure:
MSI 970A-G46
AMD FX8320E
NVidia GTX 1060
8G DDR3
Corsair TX750

 

[R4DIO4CT1VE]

Well if it all works fine when using a different SATA port, I would say its isolated to the SATA port.

That being said, one can't really be sure.