[nycbug-talk] Issue with freebsd 6.2 and disk drives

[Jonathan Stewart]

Matt Juszczak wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> My dedicated server company is deploying me a new FreeBSD 6.2 server.  The box 
> uses SATA drives, and is an AMD Athlon box.
> 
> I was getting the following error flooding my dmesg:
> 
> ad4: TIMEOUT - WRITE_DMA retrying (1 retry left) LBA=*********
> 
> so they replaced all the hardware in the box.  Still, with entirely different 
> hardware, I am getting the same error:
> 
> ad4: TIMEOUT - WRITE_DMA retrying (1 retry left) LBA=106848207
> 
> The hard drive in the new box is:
> 
> ad4: 76319MB <Seagate ST3808110AS 3.AAD> at ata2-master SATA150
> 
> Before I start telling them that this new hardware is also bad, I figured I 
> would see if there are any known problems/bugs with 6.2, or possibly a known 
> compatibility issue with SATA (and maybe if I should ask them to switch to 
> IDE).

What controller are you using?  Silicon Image controllers especially the
3112 and 3114 are notorious for being crappy.

HTH,
Jonathan