On Maw, 2004-08-31 at 16:56, Erik Mouw wrote:

The SCSI disk driver has been doing a single retry for quite some time
and it hasn't really bitten people. Why would the IDE disk driver be
different? The only case I can imagine a retry would be OK, is when we
get an UDMA CRC error (caused by bad cables).

Retries also pop up in other less obvious cases and conveniently paper
over a wide variety of timeouts, power management quirks and drives just
having a random fit. Eight is probably excessive in all cases.

For non hard disk cases many devices do want and need retry.

Alan