Yes I was having a very simmilar problem. All I did was I went and picked up a new harddisk. I got a WD 80 gb 7200 rmp with 8mb cache and it worked wonderfully. It could be because your hardisk is not supported and freeBSD for a fact supports WD. If your HD is a Maxtor you can run into many problems. FreeBSD did not like my maxtor lol.