Endless Data Loss

[Quartz]

> it's happening on ATA drives, USB flash drives,
> a few of each kind.  So, it's definitely not a hardware problem.

Well, that's not a guarantee if everything's connected to the same 
motherboard.

Have you tried temporarily disconnecting all other drives and installing 
a fresh copy of the OS on a spare drive and seeing if the problem 
persists? It kinda sounds like part of the subsystem that flushes the 
disk cache is messed up or something.


> FreeBSD forums blocks my access, possibly because I don't have a
> high-speed connection, so I can't read the material there.

I asked the list about this just recently. It turns out the forums now 
*require* either TLS 1.1 or 1.2. To complicate matters, some browsers 
that technically support this (FF 23-24, IE 8-10, OP 10-12, etc) have it 
disabled by default for some bizarre reason, requiring you to manually 
hunt through the settings to turn it on.