ATA error messages

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 11:33:25AM +0200, Patrick M. Hausen wrote:
> recently I set up a FreeNAS box:
> 
> FreeBSD freenas.intern.punkt.de 7.3-RELEASE-p3 FreeBSD 7.3-RELEASE-p3 #0: Sun Oct 17 12:57:33 CEST 2010     root at dev.freenas.org:/usr/obj/freenas/usr/src/sys/FREENAS-amd64  amd64
> 
> This is a HP/Compaq Microserver (Proliant N36L). After setting up
> the system with 4 used 500 GB Seagate drives to find out if FreeNAS
> would fit our needs, I replaced the drives with WDC RE4 2 TB
> (WD2002FYPS) and put the system in production to store backups.
> 
> Yesterday the file system perfomance suddenly came to a crawl
> and the system log fills with entries like this:
> 
> ad8: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA48 retrying (1 retry left) LBA=3907027968
> ad8: WARNING - SETFEATURES SET TRANSFER MODE taskqueue timeout - completing request directly
> ad8: WARNING - SETFEATURES SET TRANSFER MODE taskqueue timeout - completing request directly
> ad8: WARNING - SETFEATURES ENABLE RCACHE taskqueue timeout - completing request directly
> ad8: WARNING - SETFEATURES ENABLE WCACHE taskqueue timeout - completing request directly
> ad8: WARNING - SET_MULTI taskqueue timeout - completing request directly
> ...
> 
> Only one of the for drives shows these timeouts.
>
> My question: does this necessarily mean I have an isolated problem
> with that particular drive, since the other three are running just fine,
> or could there still be someting more fundamental going on?

It's impossible to tell at this stage.

Please install ports/sysutils/smartmontools (version 5.40) and provide
the output from "smartctl -a /dev/ad8".  We'll start there.

Also, you might be interested in using ahci.ko (not ataachi.ko) since
your controller supports AHCI.  You'd gain NCQ capability and be given
some of the perks of using CAM.  Your disks would be renamed from things
like ad4 to ada0 and ad6 to ada1, however.  Just FYI.  This is unrelated
to your problem though.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                   jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |