Exercising ATA disks in hopes of revealing errors

[Chuck Swiger]

On Apr 18, 2007, at 12:37 PM, Doug Poland wrote:
> I just used the "Drive Fitness Test" for IBM ATA drives on a  
> particular
> disk and it finished without detecting errors.  However, I see  
> messages
> like this:
>
> Apr 16 22:51:44 seth kernel: ad3: WARNING - WRITE_DMA UDMA ICRC  
> error (retrying request) LBA=1904935
> Apr 16 22:52:02 seth kernel: ad3: WARNING - WRITE_DMA UDMA ICRC  
> error (retrying request) LBA=8029031
> Apr 16 23:35:30 seth kernel: ad3: WARNING - WRITE_DMA UDMA ICRC  
> error (retrying request) LBA=2269287
> Apr 16 23:37:22 seth kernel: ad3: WARNING - WRITE_DMA UDMA ICRC  
> error (retrying request) LBA=3612007
> Apr 16 23:48:17 seth kernel: ad3: WARNING - WRITE_DMA UDMA ICRC  
> error (retrying request) LBA=1932123
> Apr 17 21:12:25 seth kernel: ad3: FAILURE - SMART  
> status=51<READY,DSC,ERROR> error=4<ABORTED> LBA=12734209
> Apr 17 21:12:25 seth kernel: ad3: FAILURE - SMART  
> status=51<READY,DSC,ERROR> error=4<ABORTED> LBA=12734214
>
> in /var/log/messages.
>
> Do the kernel messages indicate a potential problem with this drive?

They seem to suggest more of a cabling problem or communications  
problem between the drive and motherboard than a problem within the  
drive itself.  It could also indicate a problem with the ATA driver  
against your particular motherboard/chipset-- but without a dmesg or  
some hardware details, we can't do better than guess.

> Whom should I believe, FreeBSD or the disk diagnostics tool?

Both.

-- 
-Chuck