Date: Fri, 7 Nov 2008 22:16:25 +0100 From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?S=F8ren_Schmidt?= <sos@FreeBSD.ORG> To: Peter Wemm <peter@wemm.org> Cc: Jeremy Chadwick <koitsu@FreeBSD.ORG>, freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG, votdev@gmx.de, freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Western Digital hard disks and ATA timeouts Message-ID: <77C223A7-C5FC-45DE-BF1A-3BC7982FA582@FreeBSD.ORG> In-Reply-To: <e7db6d980811071112x315d2d94vb305245e799adfce@mail.gmail.com> References: <20081107071752.GA5842@icarus.home.lan> <e7db6d980811071112x315d2d94vb305245e799adfce@mail.gmail.com>
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On 7Nov, 2008, at 20:12 , Peter Wemm wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 11:17 PM, Jeremy Chadwick =20
> <koitsu@freebsd.org> wrote:
> [..]
>> As stated, FreeBSD's ATA command timeout is hard-set to 5 seconds, =20=
>> and
>> is not adjustable without editing the ATA code yourself and =20
>> increasing
>> the value. The FreeNAS folks have made patches available to turn the
>> timeout value into a sysctl.
>>
>> Soren and/or others, please increase this timeout value. Five =20
>> seconds
>> has now been deemed too aggressive a default. And please consider
>> migrating the timeout value into a sysctl.
>
> The 5 second timeout has been a problem for quite a while actually.
> I've had a number of instances where I've had to increase it to 20 or
> 30 seconds when recovering from marginal drives. The longest
> "successful" recovery attempt I've seen was 26 seconds, I believe on a
> Maxtor drive a few years ago. ("successful" =3D=3D the drive spent =
26
> seconds but eventually successfully read the sector). Even the IBM
> death star drives could take much longer than 5 seconds to do a
> recovery 5 years ago. 5 seconds has never been a good default.
>
> I think the timeout should be increased to at least 30 seconds. My
> windows box has a timeout that goes for several minutes.
>
> If there is concern about FreeBSD appearing to hang, I could imagine
> that a console warning message could be printed after 5 seconds. But
> just say "drive has not yet responded". But give it more time.
>
> In this day and age we're generally not playing games with udma33 vs
> 66, notched cables, poor CRC support etc. SATA seems to have
> eliminated all that. Hmm, it might make sense to increase the timeout
> on SATA connections to 2 or 3 minutes by default.
Actually I do have a patch around that logs the timeout on the console =20=
after the normal timeout (5secs), then just goes on to wait for double =20=
the timeout and log again etc etc, final timeout was IIRC 60 secs but =20=
could be anything.
-S=F8ren=
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