300GIG SATA drives

[Peter Risdon]

On Fri, 2005-01-21 at 17:24 -0600, Justin L. Boss wrote:
[top post moved down]
> On Friday 21 January 2005 02:55 am, you wrote:
> > On Fri, 2005-01-21 at 02:42 -0600, Justin L. Boss wrote:
> > > Is anyone having problems with SATA drives? I keep getting DMA errors
> > > that lock up the system.
> >
> > Assuming you are using FreeBSD 5.x then yes, this is a known problem,
> > there has been some traffic about this issue on this list in recent
> > months. I filed a pr about a specific case of this a few weeks ago but
> > it doesn't seem to have progressed.
[from top]
> Sorry, yes 5.3R to be exact. I was also informed that this was covered in the 
> stable list under the topic "Bad Desk". I look, and it pointed to Maxtor desk 
> drives as being the problem. And yes I'm using a Maxtor disk. But it 
> insinuated in the list that Maxtor large drives quality was bad and it was 
> not a problem with FreeBSD OS. But I have installed Linux and NetBSD on the 
> same drives without a hitch. I'm beginning to think it may be FreeBSD. Any 
> insight would help.

FreeBSD 4.x also works fine with these drives. I've installed 5.3,
experienced DMA errors, reinstalled exactly the same hardware with 4.10
and had error-free operation. The only OS that fails like this seems to
be FreeBSD 5.x. 

These Maxtor drives may well be flaky, but they are very widely
available and frequently installed in commodity machines. As it stands,
you can't install 5.x on any such machine. Since hardware support in the
4.x branch is lagging, this means you can't use FreeBSD at all on a lot
of computers. Not good.

I'm amazed there hasn't been more noise about this.

Peter.