Drive failures with ada on FreeBSD-9.1, driver bug or wiring issue?

[Andrea Venturoli]

On 07/18/13 10:25, Bob Bishop wrote:

> Me too (over a long period, with various hardware).
>
> There is a general problem with energy-saving drives that controllers don't understand them. Typically the drive decides to go into some power-saving mode, the controller wants to do some operation, the drive takes too long to come ready, the controller decides the drive has gone away.
>
> You have to persuade the controller to wait longer for the drive to come ready, and/or persuade the drive to stay awake. This isn't necessarily easy, eg the controller's ready wait may not be programmable.
>
> (Or avoid such drives like the plague, life's too short).

Perhaps they are WD Green drives?

In that case, other than quoting Bob's suggestion about avoiding them, 
there's something you can do:
a) turn off the drives' power-saving features (this is done through a 
DOS utility you can download);
b) try different controllers and/or different OS releases.

You'll find a lot on this problem if you search the web.
There's also a report of mine you can search on this ML, regarding 
FreeBSD specifically.

HTH.

  bye
	av.