SATA disk disappears

[Christian Gusenbauer]

On Saturday 12 January 2013 19:07:17 Warren Block wrote:
> On Sat, 12 Jan 2013, Christian Gusenbauer wrote:
> > On Friday 11 January 2013 22:47:03 Warren Block wrote:
> >> On Fri, 11 Jan 2013, Wojciech Puchar wrote:
> >>>>> GEOM_MIRROR: Component ada2 (device home1) broken, skipping.
> >>>>> GEOM_MIRROR: Cannot add disk ada2 to home1 (error=22).
> >>>>> 
> >>>>> 
> >>>>> started gmirror rebuild and it now works at full speed.
> >>>>> 
> >>>>> GEOM_MIRROR: Device home1: rebuilding provider ada2.
> >>>>> 
> >>>>> 
> >>>>> What kind of hardware failure may it be? smartctl -a /dev/ada2 shows
> >>>>> disk is fine.
> >>>> 
> >>>> I had a new WD drive recently that had a write error.  Reallocated
> >>>> sector count did not go up, but it quickly failed the SMART self-test,
> >>>> short or long.  See smartctl(8) about the -t parameters.
> >>> 
> >>> this is WD "green" 3TB
> >> 
> >> 1T Red here.  The firmware is likely very similar.
> > 
> > The same here: brandnew WD 2T green, 9.1 stable, svn rev. 244773, not
> > using GEOM. I had that problem two times within the last two weeks, but
> > the smart self tests can not find any errors/bad sectors.
> 
> Hmm.  The green drives are supposed to go to sleep for power saving, and
> then there's a multiple-second delay when they have to spin back up on
> access.  That should not be a problem for gmirror, but maybe it is.
> sysutils/ataidle can turn on the spindown.  Some drives do not accept
> that command, or claim to accept it but ignore it.  Worth a try, though.

I don't think it was the power saving spin down, because I was copying data 
from/to the drive when it suddenly vanished. So the disk was busy at that 
time. I'll give ataidle a chance - but it's hard to reproduce. I'm using the 
drive for five days now without failure.

Thanks,
Christian.