FreeBSD 5.3 freezes under heavy hdd load

[cyb]

Hello,

 from time to time my FreeBSD freezes under heavy hdd load and only a
hard reset will bring it back to life with fsck complaining about
'Softupdate Inconsistencies'.

I had this behaviour on 5.3-RELEASE, 5.3-RELEASE-p5 and now i have it on
5.4-PRERELEASE. I am using a custom kernel with SMP enabled on a P4
3.2GHz for hyperthreading. One hdd is a SATA drive and it acts fine. The
other hdd however is an ATA133 drive and i suspect it to be the problem,
since freezes only occur when it is busy (eg. copying much data from a
DVD/HDD to it or compiling a port). Whenever the system freezes there is
no warning or log entry at all.

I used 'smartmontools' to check the drive, but there was not found
anything and the hdd appeared to be fully operational.

Could the freezes come from a faulty IDE hdd (which would mean that I
better get rid of it), or are there other possiblities.

Thank you,
Andreas Rudisch

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