Promise SATA 300 TX4 Problem

[Mark Murawski]

On 03/13/12 12:47, Mark Murawski wrote:
> I'm having drive problems with my sata controller. I've seen something
> very similar to this bug reported in the way back:
>
> http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=17642
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2011-April/062428.html
>
> It's not a hardware problem. The same hardware running linux has no
> problems at all (same hard drives, sata cables, promise board and
> everything)
>
> Usually during zfs resilvering I'll see something like this.
>
> ata2: timeout waiting to issue command
> ata2: error issuing ATA_IDENTIFY command
> ata2: SIGNATURE: ffffffff
> ata2: timeout waiting to issue command
> ata2: error issuing ATA_IDENTIFY command
> ata2: SIGNATURE: ffffffff
>
> I have 5 mirrors in a zfs pool. Throughout the day, one drive in each
> mirror, one by one will drop out with those errors, and eventually get
> removed from the pool. Rebooting "fixes" the problem until the drives
> start timing out again.

Also... This started to happen specifically when I dropped in a second 
SATA 300 TX4 card (I have two in the machine).