[SATLUG] Harddrive issues

[Ed Coates]

Like to pose a question to the hardware/harddrive gurus out there.  I
have a Western Digital 250GB harddrive that I'm using for storage.
This is the 4th one that I've gone through since I bought the original
one.  I've had all these under RMA and I've sworn off them since the
warranty expired on this one, and it finally went Tang Uniform.

The sysmptoms that it's displaying is after a boot, and a mount it
play nice for a bit, but then at random times, I'll hear a click and
then the computer will lock up shortly  afterwards complaing of hdb
dma, seek, and interrupt time out errors.  I've just chalked it up to
a bad model of drives, and played them out until warranty ended.  Now
I'm not so sure.

Today I purchased a 300GB Seagate and installed it as hdc.  I then
mounted up hdb and moved all the files off it to the new Seagate.  I
then moved it to hdb because I had to take out a cdrw form hdc to hook
up the new drive.  Upon bootup, I immediatly started receiving the hdb
dma, seek, and interrupt errors from the new Seagate.

What would be the next suspect?  I get no problems from hda at all,
but could it still be the controller, just on one channel?  Would a
bad cable cause something like this?  Motherboard?

Ed