ATA Woes.

[Tony Byrne]

Folks,

I'm seeing something very unusual on one of our FreeBSD 5.4 Stable
boxes which I'm having a hard time getting to the bottom of.

You may recall that a few weeks ago I posted regarding a server that
was having trouble with WRITE_DMA and READ_DMA timeouts on it's SATA
disk. We finally decided to migrate to a new disk, so we purchased a
brand new Western Digital 250GB SATA drive and transferred the data
across, before removing the old drive.

We got about two days of trouble free access to this new disk before
it too started throwing READ_DMA problems.  This time they were error
40<UNCORRECTABLE>.  Running SmartCtl on the disk showed a number of
errors and there were specific files on the disk that could not be
read.  We moved the disk to a desktop box to confirm the problem and
noted that fsck couldn't fix the errors on the drive.

Assuming a dud drive, we purchased a replacement and this time we
spurned SATA in favour of a PATA drive (Western Digital 200GB). We
installed the drive yesterday using a brand new UDMA cable. Imagine my
surprise when I came in this morning to find that this new drive was
also now suffering from UNCORRECTABLE READ_DMA failures and SmartCtl
confirmed that the drive wasn't happy. What are the odds of getting
two dud disks from two separate batches of drives from, a reputable
brand?

The server itself is a 1U high rack mount installed in an AC'd machine
room. It is powered from a UPS. There is space around the drive and a
pair of fans draw air over the drive casing, to the casings are cool
to the touch. The motherboard is an Intel S875PWP3 equipped with an
Intel ICH5 chipset.

Is there any known problem with using WD SATA / PATA disks with
FreeBSD 5.4 Stable with the above mainboard? Is it possible that a FreeBSD
bug is causing problems with these drives, including the problems
reported by SmartCtl?

Regards,

Tony.

-- 
Tony Byrne