>>>>> Manuel Bouyer writes:

>> I'm asking because I have been running a "ST3160023AS" for a long
>> time without any problems at all. Yes, I know it's not identical,
>> but still... ;-)

Manuel> It depends on how the drive is accessed. You have to access
Manuel> sector 262144 exactly. If your drive is partitionned in such a
Manuel> way that sector 262144 in not the first sector of a fragment,
Manuel> I suspect that you won't see the problem. A dd with the
Manuel> default block size on the raw device will make it show up.

Hi Manuel!

I'm sure there are drives that have problems. But for this particular
drive, in my system, I can't seem to get it to behave badly in any
way. I have dd:ed off the entire disk and there was no problem. The
size of wd0d in the disklabel matches exactly the number of sectors
from dmesg so there should be nu unused part at the end.

wd0 at atabus0 drive 0: <ST3160023AS>
wd0: drive supports 16-sector PIO transfers, LBA48 addressing
wd0: 149 GB, 310101 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 312581808 sectors
wd0: 32-bit data port
wd0: drive supports PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 6 (Ultra/133)
wd0(satalink0:0:0): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 6 (Ultra/133) (using DMA)

But maybe it could be some firmware issue.

Best regards,

        -- Urban