Drive failures with ada on FreeBSD-9.1, driver bug or wiring issue?

[Dr Josef Karthauser]

On 18 Jul 2013, at 20:31, Charles Swiger <cswiger at mac.com> wrote:
> On Jul 18, 2013, at 12:13 PM, Dr Josef Karthauser <joe at karthauser.co.uk> wrote:
>> On 18 Jul 2013, at 13:07, Andrea Venturoli <ml at netfence.it> wrote:
>> 
>>> Perhaps they are WD Green drives?
>> 
>> They're WD RE2-GP 1 TB drives (model WD1000FYPS) , not sure if that's green or not.
> 
> Yes, those are WDC's Green drives, although they are also the higher grade version as compared to standard desktop drives which are supposed to have firmware which plays nice with RAID (TLER, time-limited error recovery).
> 
> Updating the firmware and increasing the timeout before these spin down automagically is likely to help, but as Andrea noted, such drives do have quite a history of timeout problems due to excessive head parking and their power conservation attempts.

They're currently on firmware 02.01B01, btw. Not sure if that's the latest or not.

Joe