swap_pager

[pobox at verysmall.org]

I am running FreeBSD 5.4 in VMware using USB 1.1 external HDD as a disk, 
which means quite slow I/O. It works fine for my needs, I only get

swap_pager: indefinite wait buffer: device: da0s1f, blkno: xxx, size: xxx

when performing heavy operations, such as rsync of a 1 GB database dump 
file.

All references to the problem I found point out hardware failure. Could, 
however, the problem be simply that the I/O does not manage to let the 
request go through within the 20 seconds wait time and that the hardware 
is OK (apart from the fact that I/O is slow? And - is this message just 
a notice, or does it mean that I get data corruption?

Thanks,
Iv