Steve Harding wrote: > I have been chasing intermittent problems with my hard disks for a while > now, and have replaced nearly everything,
Statements like that without an itemized list are very dangerous. You might make someone think you really changed everything, when in reality, you just changed the things that YOU felt were important. Fortunately for you, I don't believe you. :) Things to consider: Cables Interface Power supply Drives. You only mentioned the drives. BTW: There are companies which sell "too long" IDE drive cables. If you want to go fast, you gotta keep 'em short, and that won't work in many boxes. > including drives, in an > attempt to fix them. I had convinced myself that it must be a > motherboard problem so I just swapped out to the one listed below. your drives don't seem to be attached to the motherboard, so no, that's not where the problem is. (well..you could have one of those MoBos with an on-board additional IDE interface chip...) > Disk > errors show up at the end of the dmesg. This machine acts as a backup > server, with data coming in from a Windows machine (via samba) and then > a mass of rsync and gtar/gzip activity. > > What I was wondering is whether the problem might be something other > than hardware. Any thoughts would be appreciated. hmm. Most of your problems are with wd3, but some from wd2, both of which are on the Promise controller card. You didn't mention changing that out for a different brand & chip card... If for some reason, you are really fond of that Promise card which seems to be causing the problem, you might just de-tune the things to UDMA mode 4 (or 3) from the start via config(8)'ing the wd(4) driver. (man wd, man config). Might also be interesting to re-arrange the drives so that the "problem" drives are on the on-board controller...you could probably just disconnect the CDROM for the time being. Nick.
