Bad disk or kernel (ATA Driver) problem? - SOLVED

[Karl Denninger]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 07:18:08PM -0800, Sam Leffler wrote:
> I have had spectacularly bad luck with Maxtor SATA drives.  I've already 
> RMA'd 4 of 8 drives and have 2 more waiting to go back.  1 was DOA, the 
> rest failed completely while in operation (typically locking up the 
> machine).  These were all Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 6Y160M0 160GB Serial 
> ATA drives. After testing for power, cables, disk controller, 
> motherboard, and other potential reasons I've decided the drives were 
> just faulty and have switched to another vendor.
> 
> 	Sam

These two are DiamondMax10s - let's hope that this doesn't apply to that 
line as well.

I'm going to be royally POd if so.  One RMA is already issued and that one
is going back - hopefully the replacement is good.  If not, I will not be
amused....

BTW I've had relatively bad luck with recent WD drives - which is why I
decided to try the Maxtors.  My experience with WDs is that in a server they
last about a year before locking up with unrecoverable errors which cannot
be cleared except by a power cycle.  The lockup extends to the host bus; it
appears that the microcode is holding either DREQ or DACK on the cable and 
as such that entire PATA bus is locked out.

I've sent two back in the last six months with the exact same problem - WD 
has been replacing them, but this failure mode is very ugly as it takes 
down the machine that they're in at the time, RAID or no RAID.

What 'other vendor' have you found that makes RELIABLE SATA disks in the 
high capacity (e.g. 200-300gb) arena?

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