ATA Drive Issues

Norberto Meijome freebsd at meijome.net
Sat Apr 1 01:47:56 UTC 2006


On Fri, 31 Mar 2006 15:43:35 -0800
"Wil Hatfield" <freebsd at hyperconx.com> wrote:

> Ok I am just nervous about going to 6.x and putting these customers
> through this not once more, but twice when I have to go back to 4.x.

Sorry for asking the obvious, but why not try with 6 without any
customers on the servers? putting new hardware/software straight into
production seems to me like looking for troubles.

Anyway, back to the problem at hand, just because they ARE new doesn't
mean the cables/drives are NOT bad. Granted, that many drives in a bad
state would be weird...but not really if they are from the same
manufacturer's batch. smartmon clearing them would suggest that it's
cabling issue. seriously, TRYING new good quality cables from a
different provider can't be that hard/expensive?

alternatively, try different BIOS version. usually a new version of the
bIOS fixes problems. BUT I have a server (dual amd64 TYAN box,
2x SATA-I controllers with 4 SATA-II drives) which would simply not
boot with a newer version of the bios, so I left it at the original
BIOS (yes, keep backups of your BIOS upgrades! :-) .

FWIW, 6 is better than 5.4, at least for me.

good luck,
Beto


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