From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Mar 6 18:55:04 2009 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 01B16106566C for ; Fri, 6 Mar 2009 18:55:04 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from gary.jennejohn@freenet.de) Received: from mout5.freenet.de (mout5.freenet.de [IPv6:2001:748:100:40::2:7]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8DB5F8FC13 for ; Fri, 6 Mar 2009 18:55:03 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from gary.jennejohn@freenet.de) Received: from [195.4.92.12] (helo=2.mx.freenet.de) by mout5.freenet.de with esmtpa (ID gary.jennejohn@freenet.de) (port 25) (Exim 4.69 #76) id 1LffCI-0006Ul-Fm for freebsd-current@freebsd.org; Fri, 06 Mar 2009 19:55:02 +0100 Received: from td583.t.pppool.de ([89.55.213.131]:22995 helo=ernst.jennejohn.org) by 2.mx.freenet.de with esmtpa (ID gary.jennejohn@freenet.de) (port 25) (Exim 4.69 #79) id 1LffCI-0005JU-8U for freebsd-current@freebsd.org; Fri, 06 Mar 2009 19:55:02 +0100 Date: Fri, 6 Mar 2009 19:55:01 +0100 From: Gary Jennejohn To: FreeBSD-Current Message-ID: <20090306195501.1f88632a@ernst.jennejohn.org> X-Mailer: Claws Mail 3.7.0 (GTK+ 2.14.7; amd64-portbld-freebsd8.0) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: SATA disks suddenly stop working X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list Reply-To: gary.jennejohn@freenet.de List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 06 Mar 2009 18:55:04 -0000 Back to the saga of problems with AHCI. Yesterday I had one of my problem disks in a dockingstation, which was attached per USB2 with the disk mounted. When I shut down the machine I noticed that the disk suddenly spun up. Evidently it spun itself down (I didn't know it would do that) and the USB stack (or something) noticed it and forced it to spin back up. This gave me a clue as to what might have been causing my problems with this disk. So today I attached it per eSATA and mounted it. I started a small shell function which touches a file on the mounted file system every 60 seconds. I figured that would force the disk to stay spun up. The disk has been running all day without any problems. Normally, after an hour or so of inactivity any access to the drive would produce lots of errors and require a POR to recover. This leads me to conclude that nost of the problems which I've seen had nothing to do with the driver, but were caused by the disk itself. Perhaps the driver could try to spin up a disk if a command fails, although I'm not certain how the driver could determine that, ie. spun down, as the cause of any errors. But as I wrote above, _something_ spun the disk back up when it was attached per USB. --- Gary Jennejohn