There is an issue with some ATA drives that involves behavior designed to reduce operating noise. I've not heard of these being an issue in any SATA drives (yet) but you might want to follow up on the possibility. The drives report "unavailable" to the controller and the controller drops them out of the array. The links below offer tools to tune IDE family drives - perhaps if your issue isn't the "acoustic" setting it's something else listed at these links. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Failed after install: Where do I find the utility to disable the acoustic bit for Western Digital, Samsung or Hitachi/IBM ATA drives to keep them from timing out and falling out of the array? Please visit the following links: For Samsung AAM Following screen shows how to use AUTOMATIC ACOUSTIC MANAGEMENT. You can select a proper seek mode among FAST/MIDDLE/QUIET in accordance with user's circumstance. Select the proper AAM by selecting AAM MODE (Quiet/Middle/Fast is changed by pressing Enter Key) and perform PROCESS by pressing Enter Key. DISPLAY CURRENT MODE represents current AAM status. Performance : Fast>Middle>Quiet (Fast is the best) Acoustic Noise: Fast>Middle>Quiet (Fast is the worst) http://www.samsung.com/Products/HardDiskDrive/utilities/hutil.htm For Western Digital Problem: WD EIDE drives are dropped from an IDE RAID array or system after several days or weeks of error-free operation. Solution: The problem is a result of a feature that reduces idle acoustic noise in desktop drives. This feature may cause a timeout likely (though not exclusively) in an IDE RAID environment. To disable the feature, you can run a simple Western Digital utility to turn off a single bit in the drive's run-time configuration. Disabling of this feature will NOT impact normal system operations. No firmware or hardware changes are required. http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_sid=*_ 5Ivm2h&p_lva=&p_faqid=913&p_created=1047068027&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9ncmlk c29ydD0mcF9yb3dfY250PTEmcF9zZWFyY2hfdGV4dD1hY291c3RpYyZwX3NlYXJjaF90eXBl PTQmcF9wcm9kX2x2bDE9fmFueX4mcF9wcm9kX2x2bDI9fmFueX4mcF9jYXRfbHZsMT0yNyZw X3NvcnRfYnk9ZGZsdCZwX3BhZ2U9MQ**&p_li= For Hitachi/IBM http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/download.htm Hope it helps, Dan -----Original Message----- From: Johan Backlund [mailto:jbacklund@yahoo.com] Sent: Friday, March 05, 2004 6:13 PM To: suse-amd64@suse.com Subject: [suse-amd64] SATA dma_timer_expiry problems revisited Sorry, for repeating this question - but I need to give it one more chance to get solved before I throw those SATA disks out. Sometimes (usually not that often) when accessing my SATA disks I get this: hda: dma_timer_expiry: dma status == 0x24 hda: DMA interrupt recovery hda: lost interrupt This timeout occurs after some 15 seconds of halted activity on the drive. I have had this problem since day 1. I have lived in hope that kerenl updates would catch this problem but now I am on 2.6.3 and the problem is still there. Can anyone give me a hint on what might be causing this? I mean, could it be hardware failure (cables?), lousy chipset (VIA VT8237), configuration errors, kernel bugs etc.? thanks for listening. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Search - Find what you're looking for faster http://search.yahoo.com -- Check the List-Unsubscribe header to unsubscribe For additional commands, email: suse-amd64-help@suse.com