Bad disk or kernel (ATA Driver) problem?

[Karl Denninger]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 01:33:12PM -0800, Jon Simola wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 15:13:01 -0600, Karl Denninger <karl at denninger.net> wrote:
> 
> > I've got a 2 x SATA system here I'm playing with in preparation to move
> > over production to 5.x.
> > 
> > These drives have been working under 4.x for quite some time - they're 250GB
> > Maxtor disks....
> > 
> > ad4: 239372MB <Maxtor 6B250S0/BANC1980> [486344/16/63] at ata2-master SATA150
> > ad6: 239372MB <Maxtor 6B250S0/BANC1980> [486344/16/63] at ata3-master SATA150
> >
> > The first disk runs nice and happy.
> > 
> > The second does too, provided that the load isn't too high.  If it is, then I
> > start to get DMA transfer errors, such as the following:
> > 
> > ad6: FAILURE - READ_DMA status=51<READY,DSC,ERROR> error=40<UNCORRECTABLE>
> > LBA=543191
> > GEOM_MIRROR: Request failed (error=5). ad6[READ(offset=278048256,
> > length=102400)]
> > GEOM_MIRROR: Device m0: provider ad6 disconnected.
> > ad6: FAILURE - READ_DMA status=51<READY,DSC,ERROR> error=40<UNCORRECTABLE>
> > LBA=300463
> > ad6: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (2 retries left) LBA=90863
> > ad6: FAILURE - READ_DMA timed out
> > ad6: FAILURE - READ_DMA status=51<READY,DSC,ERROR> error=40<UNCORRECTABLE>
> > ad6: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (2 retries left) LBA=120663
> > ad6: FAILURE - READ_DMA timed out
> > 
> > I'm having a lot of trouble believing this is an actual disk problem.  Among
> > other things, its happening at different places - not always at the same
> > block.
> 
> I've got a few 1U Supermicro boxes running dual SATA drives:
> ad4: 78167MB <Maxtor 6Y080M0/YAR51HW0> [158816/16/63] at ata2-master SATA150
> ad6: 78167MB <Maxtor 6Y080M0/YAR51HW0> [158816/16/63] at ata3-master SATA150
> 
> I've run into all sorts of problems with every one, and changing the
> IDE channel settings in the BIOS always fixes it. Which really annoys
> me, because I setup a new box, run it for a couple weeks, then the
> drives start getting flaky under load. Then I go change the setting in
> the BIOS (that I always forget to do on initial setup) and it's dead
> stable for months at a time.
> 
> I've had the exact same problem with FreeBSD 5.3 and OpenBSD 3.5 as well.

There are no channel settings available on this system in the BIOS... 
(Dell 400SC)

I am running the most current BIOS as well, if it matters.....

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