problems with Hitachi 1TB SATA drives

[Daniel Eriksson]

Bill Swingle wrote:

> I have a fileserver that currently has a 4-disc raid connected to an
> IDE 3ware card. I had hoped to replace this dying system with a pair
> of synchronized 1TB SATA drives. When trying to newfs them both
> eventually failed with DMA READ or WRITE timeouts. Here's some infos:

A few things to check:

* Is your PSU powerful enough? (Test with the old RAID-5 set
disconnected or with a different PSU.)
* Does all fans in the box spin easily? (If the bearings of the old
drives and fans are giving out they can draw a lot more power.)
* If you disconnect ad4, does ad6 work fine by itself?
* Does the problem go away if you replace the SATA cables?
* Install smartmontools from ports and run a long selftest on both
drives. (Or get the drive tools from Hitachi and run a full test from
DOS.)
* Is ACPI enabled and does 'vmstat -i' show any IRQ sharing? Maybe try
to move some PCI cards around.

/Daniel Eriksson