[ILUG] Hard drive Issues

[Kevin Philp]

Wondering if anyone has any advice on the following issue:

We have a Maxtor 250GB Maxline III SATA drive which is sitting in Ubuntu 
box. It has the jumpers set for 1.5MB as the motherboard doesn't support 
3MB. Every few days it develops a problem where the drive freezes for 
about 30 seconds when its accessed accompanied with a worrying clunk 
noise. Everything still works - just you have to wait 30S for every disk 
access.

By restarting the system the problem seems to clear itself - eventually 
- but just recurs a few days later. I haven't experienced any crashes or 
data loss. I have Googled around and found these drives have problems 
with nforce chipsets but this motherboard has a sata-sil chipset. Also 
the system works with no problems on an older Samsung SATA hardrive. Is 
the problem in the labata driver? or is the hardrive on its way out? The 
offending section of dmesg is below.

Thanks

Kevin

[ 1565.181909] ata4.00: speed down requested but no transfer mode left
[ 1565.181914] ata4.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 
frozen
[ 1565.181920] ata4.00: cmd 20/00:80:46:a4:76/00:00:00:00:00/e2 tag 0 
cdb 0x0 data 65536 in
[ 1565.181922]          res 50/01:01:01:00:00/01:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 
0x202 (HSM violation)
[ 1565.181932] ata4: soft resetting port
[ 1565.266976] ATA: abnormal status 0x7F on port 0xD007
[ 1565.272358] ATA: abnormal status 0x7F on port 0xD007
[ 1565.285001] ata4.00: configured for PIO0
[ 1565.285008] ata4: EH complete
[ 1565.306696] SCSI device sda: 490234752 512-byte hdwr sectors (251000 MB)
[ 1565.307302] sda: Write Protect is off
[ 1565.307304] sda: Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
[ 1565.308249] SCSI device sda: write cache: enabled, read cache: 
enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA