amd64/157615: AHCI device timeouts with ATI IXP700 SATA controller on high IO load

[Petteri Valkonen]

The following reply was made to PR amd64/157615; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Petteri Valkonen <petteri.valkonen at iki.fi>
To: bug-followup at FreeBSD.org, petteri.valkonen at iki.fi
Cc:  
Subject: Re: amd64/157615: AHCI device timeouts with ATI IXP700 SATA
 controller on high IO load
Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2011 13:10:52 +0300

 Samsung HD204UI disks manufactured before December 2010 have a firmware bug that can cause bad sectors to be reported under certain conditions:
 
 http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki/SamsungF4EGBadBlocks
 
 My drives were all manufactured either in December 2010 (marked as "2010.12" on the label) or January 2011 ("2011.01") and, in theory, should not require patching. However, I decided to update the firmwares for good measure.
 
 After patching the failed drives' firmwares with Samsung's updater (http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/faqView.do?b2b_bbs_msg_id=386) and re-enabling the ahci(4) driver, I can now scrub the pool without any timeouts.
 
 Thus it would seem that the root cause of the problem was the buggy Samsung firmware instead of the AHCI driver. Furthermore, contrary to previous reports, *some* disks manufactured in December 2010 may still require patching.