3ware 7506, FreeBSD 4.x, Maxtor Disks & SMART Problems.

Jason Thomson jason.thomson at mintel.com
Mon Jun 14 13:40:03 GMT 2004


We're not using the ata driver - it's the twe driver - I believe the 
SMART events are supposed to be handled by the controller firmware.

(Which should then report back to the FreeBSD driver when things go wrong).

Hmmm - I've just done a little more research,  and it appears that my 
understanding of SMART is flawed - the drive just makes the information 
available - and doesn't actively signal the controller.  The controller 
/ OS / SMART software has to read the SMART status and then act accordingly.

Maybe it's nothing to do with SMART,  and instead it's just something 
wrong with Maxtor disks.

Is anyone else aware of problems with Maxtor disks?

(I must confess to seeing NMIs raised on a DELL box with the ServerWorks 
CSB6 Chipset with Maxtor's 160GB drives.  I assumed that it was the ATA 
controller.  We worked round it by using slower DMA modes.  Maybe it was 
the disks.)




so14k at so14k.com wrote:

> 
> IIRC, the ATA driver in 4.x (pre ATAng) doesn't support S.M.A.R.T.
> Unfortunately you'll need to run 5.2-CURRENT for that.
> 
> 
> Regards,
> Brad Davis
> 
> 


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