FreeBSD 6.x problems with IDE drives

[Javier Henderson]

Greetings,

I've a motherboard and disk drive that have been running on older
versions of FreeBSD for quite a while, reliably. Recently, I moved to
FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE (and lately to 6.1-RELEASE, but it didn't help),
and the system periodically shows:

> ad4: FAILURE - device detached

This is likely to happen under heavy I/O load (the machine serves a
few dozen virtual websites, averaging 15 Mb/s sustained).

Then the machine will eventually reboot.

The motherboard is an MSI with an AMD 1.3 GHz CPU and 1.25GB of RAM,
it has two IDE controllers, a VIA 8235, and a Promise (I can't access
the machine right now to get the exact model number). The problem
happens the same with either controller. I tried both UDMA100 and PIO4
modes, no difference.

SMART reports a healthy drive, and as mentioned before, it didn't have
problems with older versions of FreeBSD (5.4-RELEASE to be precise)
and under similarly heavy load.

The IDE cable was replaced, just in case, but again, no difference.

Any ideas?

-jav