ATA failure with 4.6.2 & 250GB drive?

[freebsd-stable at freebsd.org]

> > FWIW, I have had _major_ problems (ie drive failure) when trying to use
> > an 80 wire cable on a UDMA33 board with  an ATA66 drive - I would recommend
> > never using 80 wire cables on controllers that don't support UDMA66 or
> > better. The reverse, using 80 wire cables on UDMA66 (or better) controllers
> > with ATA33 drives is ok, however, and I've done that successfully.
> 
> The only difference between 40 and 80 wire ATA cables are the extra 40
> wires which are all connected to ground and pin 34 in the host connector
> which is not connected to the conductor in an 80 wire cable.  The ANSI
> ATA/ATAPI-5 standard says that "80-conductor cable assemblies may be used
> in place of 40-conductor cable assemblies to improve signal quality ..."
> (section 4.2.2.1).
> 
> Unless someone can suggest a specific mechanism for the drive failures,
> I would expect that your correlation between drive failures and using
> 80 conductor cables with UDMA33 controllers was just coincidence.

Thanks for the feedback. In that case, it may be that I had a dud cable -
when I tested the cable at the time, it appeared to have continuity
_between_ some pins - my assumption was that the controller coudn't handle
that and, obviously (now), it couldn't.

-- joel --
AusCERT, ITS, Uni of Qld, Australia -- hotline: [+61] [07] 33654417
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