Comment 97 for bug 550559

This particular issue has been plaguing my setup for quite some time. Many different hard drives were tried (different mainboard, too), but I eventually just learned to tolerate it and kept replacing hard drives after they were inevitably 'rotted' by the machine's behavior. I'm not entirely sure _what_ the system is doing to the drives, but it seems to cause serious mechanical wear over time. I think that it is causing excessive resets of the drive, and this eventually leads to degradation of the drive's surface itself.

However, at least in my case I think I found the culprit. I was attempting to copy data from a 'bad' drive to a new 2TB WD drive, and the new drive was throwing these errors as well. Stuck the new drive in an external USB enclosure and the drive copies sped up, and no errors were reported.

I think the source of my problem was some old slide-in SATA enclosures I was using on my server. I can't find the manufacturer anymore, but something about the circuitboard on these units was causing the drive problems. I think it was ONLY causing problems with newer SATA-spec drives...older, 1.5SATA drives did not seem to be throwing errors like this.

I realize I'm probably in the minority here (I doubt anyone else was using these things), but by directly connecting my drives to the SATA controller I'm not seeing the errors anymore. This may shed light on what the real issue is, but I don't know the kernel innards well enough to venture a guess as to what the dysfunction is.