On 01/10/2019 14:36, Thomas Mueller wrote:
Do you know when (what version) NCQ was introduced to NetBSD? Was it before or
after 7.99.1?
It went in after NetBSD 8.x was branched so I'd guess it would be
somewhere in the 8.99.xx versions. It is in the 9.0_BETA branch as well.
What is atatctl? "which atatctl" shows nothing. Is atatctl part of
smartmontools?
I don't have smartmontools installed but could run it from the System Rescue CD
or build in NetBSD (or FreeBSD or Linux?) on the Hitachi hard drive.
Firmware or driver bug could explain why the Western Digital Green hard drive
might be adversely affected but not all other hard drives.
I believe Western Digital discontinued the Green hard drives because of
technical or performance problems.
The fact that the drives were deliberately designed to spin themselves
down behind the back of the operating system and ATA driver meaning that
the next time the OS tried to do an IO the operation would timeout and
have to be retried after the disk had spun back up. This tended to
trigger the type of fsbn errors you are seeing.
All the extra spin up/spin down cycles played havoc with performance and
I think also took its toll on the drive electronics. The whole idea was
fairly flawed as spinning up a drive uses more power than at any other
time in drive operation so doing it more often costs power unless you
are confident that the drive can be down long enough to offset that usage.
I thought they did finally produce a version of the firmware where you
could at least turn that ridiculous behaviour off but I've no idea where
you can find it. The other way to avoid it is to ensure the OS does a
disk operation often enough to inhibit the spindown.
Mike
