External 2.5 Hard Drive Enclosure, Part 2

Several months ago I described my experiences with an Adaptec DuoConnect PC Card adapter and a ByteCC 2.5 HDD enclosure. Back then I used a 30 GB HDD, I think made by Fujitsu. Today I replaced that 30 GB HDD with a Hitachi Travelstar 7K60 60 GB 7200 RPM HDD. I initially wanted to replace the OEM 20 GB 5400 RPM HDD in my Thinkpad a20p with the 7K60. Unfortunately, it seemed to run a little hot and made my laptop's fan act erratically. I decided the 7K60 would make a good portable Firewire-accessible external drive.

When I plugged the external HDD enclosure in via Firewire to the laptop's Adaptec adapter, I saw these messages from the kernel:

Nov  6 09:24:28 orr kernel: GEOM: create disk da0 dp=0xc3a81c50
Nov  6 09:24:28 orr kernel: da0 at sbp0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
Nov  6 09:24:28 orr kernel: da0:  Fixed Direct Access SCSI-0 device 
Nov  6 09:24:28 orr kernel: da0: 50.000MB/s transfers, Tagged Queueing Enabled
Nov  6 09:24:28 orr kernel: da0: 57231MB (117210240 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T
 7296C)

When I tried to copy large files from my laptop to the external HDD, the kernel began showing these errors:

Nov  6 09:27:36 orr kernel: sbp0:0:0 No ocb(1468976c) on the queue
Nov  6 09:28:45 orr kernel: sbp0:0:0 No ocb(14689ebc) on the queue

Luckily this post suggested I try this command to disable Tagged Queueing:

orr:/$ sudo camcontrol tags da0 -N 1
(pass0:sbp0:0:0:0): tagged openings now 1
(pass0:sbp0:0:0:0): device openings: 1

With that change, the 'ocb' errors stopped.