VERY frustrated with FreeBSD/UFS stability - please help or comment...

[Julian H. Stacey]

Gore Jarold wrote:
> I have been extremely dissatisfied with the stability
> of the FreeBSD UFS/UFS2 implementation throughout all

Are you using external USB drives ?  If so, suspect range widens,
both hardware & software.

	I sometimes see some problems on my laptop USB with at least
	6.1 & 6.2-rel, some of which could also materialise on a
	tower with USB (& reshuffling space, moving 30G
	of src/ ports/ packages/ distfiles/ & music between
	internal & 2 external drives is a way to get trouble.

	- External drive hangs. Apparently it used to hang on previous 
	  owner's XP too (but was that drive or XP or owner or ?).
	  It has a FREECOM USB2-IDE Controller in enclosure).
	- Failure to flush blocks on halt (not sure if seen this with no USB).
	- Carbus Belkin USB2 card gets far too hot, painful to touch 
	  at times (& my brother's same type card he used in same
	  type laptop under XP, died after he `cooked' his card in
	  my laptop.  Never gets so hot under MS-XP but I have no
	  idea how (or desire) to load an MS-XP hard.  (I wonder
	  if perhaps MS-XP switched the card to power saving mode
	  whereas maybe FreeBSD left it on all the time).
	- Potentialy USB2 ZediWorks hub, or cable, but no reason to suspect 
	  those.

Of course many externals also use own power, & I can't say
I've yet monitored all external power supply under load with both
DVM & scope :-) 

I've known hubs drop to 1% of traffic because capacitors in power
block dried out; also had a tower (new everything except old power
& chassis) be unstable, & crash when scsi cdrom spun up, which
gliched power. There's always power to consider, especially if
everything at max.

-- 
Julian Stacey. Munich Computer Consultant, BSD Unix C Linux. http://berklix.com
	Ihr Rauch = mein allergischer Kopfschmerz.  Dump cigs: Try snuff.