ada drives keep timing out!

[Tom Evans]

On Fri, Feb 20, 2015 at 11:21 AM, Dr Josef Karthauser <joe at tao.org.uk> wrote:
> In this case other report no such issues on the same hardware running Linux, so it seems to me to be an internal timeout issue within FreeBSD, or maybe Linux retries more than FreeBSD and so doesn’t experience the issue that we do. It’s clear that FreeBSD is proactively disconnecting the drive when the timeout occurs. So, maybe there’s something that can be done there.

Linux has more automatic quirks for troublesome hardware, it may also
have a longer default timeout. FreeBSD's

WD green drives are green, they spin down frequently if idle. If you
then try and use them, they can take considerably longer than the
timeout to spin back up and be ready, and the kernel gives up.

You can make the WD green drives less green by using a dos tool,
wdidle3.exe. Google will tell you more (and show that WD green drives
cause people problems on all OS when they use them in RAID). The
continual parking/unparking considerably reduces the life of disk.

You can tell BSD to wait longer with a higher "kern.cam.ada.default_timeout".

Cheers

Tom