Ville, Yes I definitely noticed the "blame the hardware" issue. I suppose it is just the communities way of going through the process of elimination. The upgrade to 6.1 seems to be the best thing I have done so far. Now if I can just figure out why the 5.4 machine doesn't reboot on panics. I worry that 6.1 also has this issue but since it hasn't paniced I can't tell. Once I can figure that problem out I am home free.
-- Wil Hatfield -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Ville Lundberg Sent: Monday, April 03, 2006 11:29 AM To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: RE: ATA Drive Issues > From: "Wil Hatfield" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > I am giving 6.1 a whirl. > In the first 5 minutes I have already noticed that there are some > obvious filesystem issues fixed. I ran a tar and compared the > speed to that on one of my 4.x boxes and low and behold they are > about the same. THANK GOD! Hi, I had similar issues with a server freezing, and it also turned out to be WRITE_DMA failures on one of the (SATA) HDs. This was on 6.0-release, and upgrading to 6-stable helped. Nice to see it fixed your problem, too. 6.1 seems to be a really stable and performing branch. When reporting problems for HDs, it's good policy to always state the HD and motherboard/chipset brand, and to point out if/when one has checked/renewed the cabling (as you did). Also test results from smartmontools and HD manufacturer disk tests are good to state. Even when doing this, the FreeBSD community is peculiarly keen on blaming everything on failing HW and bad cabling. My experience is, though, that the first thing to blame (when cabling and HDs have passed tests), is the HD controller, especially when it's one of the crappy ones, like Silicon Image 3xxx. These crappy chipsets results in that FreeBSD doesn't have good support for them, as they are unreliable per definition. I don't meen to critisize FreeBSD, on the contrary. But it's a bit annoying to always get responses to all HD related stuff that "your HW is failing", when everything you've done for the last week is tests which claim it isn't. I'm not familiar with the innards of FreeBSD, so could someone explain why FreeBSD is so picky about cabling? I'm pretty well-read in physics, so the theory of FreeBSD using less-energetic electrons to pass data in the cables doesn't seem to hold up (insert smiley here). I mean, if other operating systems don't do some sort of error checking to exclude the errors on HD/CD-ROM drives that make FreeBSD hiccup, then what's up? --Ville _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"