ATA Woes.

[J. T. Farmer]

Tony Byrne wrote:

>Hello Wilko,
>
>Tuesday, July 19, 2005, 7:35:40 PM, you wrote:
>
>WB> On Tue, Jul 19, 2005 at 11:22:01AM -0700, Jon Simola wrote..
>
>  
>
>>>What I've recently learned the hard way is that desktop drives have no
>>>place in a server. I've now failed 4 of 10 SATA drives (Maxtor and WD)
>>>in 1U rackmounts, and am moving on to trying the WD Raptor SATA drives
>>>(which claim to be low-end server).
>>>      
>>>
>
>WB> Properly cooled?
>
>I can't speak for Jon, but the two disks that 'failed' sequentially on
>me in the last 48 hours took turns in a housing that had fans
>installed to draw air over the drive.  Smartctl reported the drive
>temp. as 26 Deg.C.
>

I don't think it's a problem of proper cooling or bad drives.  I have
a _desktop_ box with an 80G WDC drive in it, brand new.  It installs
WinXP and Linux just fine.  It will not get through writing the superblocks
for FreeBSD during the install _unless_ I boot the install kernel in "save"
mode.  This is installing 5.4-RELEASE, _and_ 5-Stable (several different
snapshots, the most recent 8 July).  This is a PATA drive, nothing
special about it.  The CPU is an AlthonXP 2200, mb has the VIA KT266A
chipset.

Out of the box, I'm having a lot of trouble installing 5.anything on this
configuration.  These same  READ_DMA errors appear to be occurring
with both SATA and PATA drives.  (The drive checks out as fine.
I'm about to run WDC diagnostics on it again.)

John

----------------------------------------------------------------------
John T. Farmer            Owner & CTO                GoldSword Systems
jfarmer at goldsword.com     865-691-6498               Knoxville TN
    Consulting, Design, & Development of Networks & Software