I can confirm that. Many FreeNAS users had problems with their HDDs (e.g. with APM, awake disks to access them after they felt to sleep). Increasing timeouts solves the problem in most cases. I think increasing the value BUT allowing the user to set it to a preferred value via sysctrl would be the best solution. I don't understand why adding such an sysctl interface is such an problem for some people. If someone wants to set any other value than the default one HE MUST KNOW what he do and live with the consequences. There are so many other kernel/system variables that can harm the system.

Regards
Volker
<http://dict.leo.org/ende?lp=ende&p=thMx..&search=implications>
Peter Wemm wrote:
On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 11:17 PM, Jeremy Chadwick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[..]
As stated, FreeBSD's ATA command timeout is hard-set to 5 seconds, and
is not adjustable without editing the ATA code yourself and 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 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" == 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.
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