shoe-box disk errors

[dieter at titan.nmt.edu]

The symptoms:

On a fairly regular basis, with no apparent correlation to power outages,
our shoe-box disks will start generating complaints of the form:

    sd0b:  write retry,  blk 11736  (abs blk 27648)
           sense key(0x3): medium error,  error code(0x10): I.D. CRC error

The actual error code/message changes, as does the partition.  I often see
"retry" and "read".  Re-formatting seems to clear it up (for a time), but
I'd prefer to avoid the problem altogether.

Ideas?

Dieter Muller
--
dieter%nmt at relay.cs.net
dieter at jupiter.nmt.edu