Started having ATA Hard Drive DMA timeout issues

[gsporter]

I recently started experiancing ATA Hard Drive DMA timeout issues with the last couple 1.2.3 RC2 snapshots I installed in July.
The wd diag. do not report any issues.

7.2-RELEASE-p2 FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE-p2 #0: Sun Jul 12 08:41:25 EDT 2009   
sullrich@FreeBSD-7_2-RELENG_1_2-snapshots.pfsense.org:/usr/obj.pfSense/usr/pfSensesrc/src/sys/pfSense_SMP.7  i386

atacontrol list

ATA channel 0:
    Master:  ad0 <wdc wd800jb-00jjc0="" 05.01c05="">ATA/ATAPI revision 6

atapci0: <sis 964="" udma133="" controller="">port 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6,0x170-0x177,0x376,0x3280-0x328f at device 2.5 on pci0
ad0: 76319MB <wdc wd800jb-00jjc0="" 05.01c05="">at ata0-master UDMA100
ad0: error issuing READ_DMA command
ad0: error issuing WRITE_DMA command
atapci0: <sis 964="" udma133="" controller="">port 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6,0x170-0x177,0x376,0x3280-0x328f at device 2.5 on pci0
ad0: 76319MB <wdc wd800jb-00jjc0="" 05.01c05="">at ata0-master UDMA100
atapci0: <sis 964="" udma133="" controller="">port 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6,0x170-0x177,0x376,0x3280-0x328f at device 2.5 on pci0
ad0: 76319MB <wdc wd800jb-00jjc0="" 05.01c05="">at ata0-master UDMA100
ad0: error issuing WRITE_DMA command
ad0: error issuing WRITE_DMA command
ad0: error issuing WRITE_DMA command
ad0: error issuing READ_DMA command
atapci0: <sis 964="" udma133="" controller="">port 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6,0x170-0x177,0x376,0x3280-0x328f at device 2.5 on pci0
ad0: 76319MB <wdc wd800jb-00jjc0="" 05.01c05="">at ata0-master UDMA100

Is this a freebsd issue?  If so can anyone reccomend a work arounds or what direction to pursue?  The system terminally locks
up at random intervals.

Thanks for your attention to this matter,

GP</wdc></sis></wdc></sis></wdc></sis></wdc></sis></wdc>

[Guest]

This is the hardware beginning to fail.  There's a very good chance that your drive is going bad.  Lockups are almost always hardware related and the DMA timeouts are a good indication that the drive is going south.