ata3 and ata4 disk errors

[Alan Cox]

On Mon, 19 Nov 2012 07:09:38 -0700
JD <jd1008 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I am getting lots of ata3 and ata4 errors in the system log.
> In spite of these errors, when I unmount the partitions of both drives
> and I fsck every partition, no errors are found.
> The out of dmesg with the errors is at
> http://www.sendspace.com/file/761te2
> 
> The drives are esata-2 (300mbits/s) and are housed in brand new external 
> enclosures
> with 80mm fans, connected to the laptop via a 32-bit cardbus with 2 
> esata-2 ports.
> 
> The drives themselves are not new. One of them is 6 years old, the other 
> 4 years old.
> Their former enclosures, which were also equipped with 80mm fans, were 
> discarded due
> to their power supply failures.
> Hoping a hard drive expert could tell me if the errors are caused by the 
> cardbus adapter
> or the hard drives themselves.

All I can tell you is that the kernel issued a DMA read and it came back
as an error, we then waited for the drive to go back to ready and it
didn't so we tried resetting it and that didn't make much sense at all,
so it tries various resets and it seems eventually the drive comes back
to life. Then later it fals again on a DMA write.

Very hard to tell to be honest.