The version of the ata driver we have tends to have problems
when the drive returns errors. That is, the error paths just
aren't tested very well (on FreeBSD or DragonFly). It's been
a plague in FreeBSDland for over a decade, in fact. The most
recent code on FreeBSD might work a little better but for all
intents and purposes the ATA/IDE chipset ABI has too many quirks
to be dependable.
The AHCI and SILI drivers are much better suited for error path
handling. Of course, using AHCI requires a chipset that is
AHCI-capable. Ultimately all new computers will have AHCI capable
chipsets but it might be another year or two before the transition
is complete.
-Matt
Matthew Dillon
<dil...@backplane.com>
