By the way, I've determined our removable IDE disk trays are manufactured by SNT (http://www.snt.com.tw/metal.htm) and are part number SNT-129. It looks like these are the same ones startech sells. I've placed my hardware configuration here:
http://www.freebsd.uwaterloo.ca/twiki/bin/view/Freebsd/DualAmd2000 Out of my 4 AMD systems, my test results are now: - 1 refuses to die - 1 panic'ed and died, after not being able to drop to PIO. Many fsck errors upon reboot. The console error was "ata0: resetting devices .. ad0: DMA limited to UDMA33, non-ATA66 cable or device" - 2 dropped to PIO after about 15 hours of tests, and ran fine (but slowly) with PIO As for the the 2 that dropped to PIO and worked, I rebooted and manually ran atacontrol mode 0 UDMA33 UDMA33 and restarted the tests. No problems in 36 hours so far. My 4 Intel systems (which only have a UDMA33 controller on the motherboard) have also been running 48 hours no problems. The test I run is... dbench 1 sleep 300 dbench 2 sleep 300 dbench 3 ... up to about "dbench 80" and then I kill and restart. With UDMA100, "dbench 10" gave 43 MB/Sec With UDMA33, "dbench 10" gives 37 MB/Sec I still plan to: - try UDMA100 with the drives directly attached (ie. no removable tray) - maybe try a non onboard IDE controller - shuffle the disks to see if the problems follow the disks or not At present, I don't suspect bad media because the error message is "WRITE command timeout tag=0 serv=0" which doesn't suggest a specific sector/track etc, and running with UDMA33 instead of UDMA100 makes the problem appear to vanish. ---------------------------------------- This mail sent through www.mywaterloo.ca To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message