VirtualBox on 9.x Host / Guest: IDE -> SATA

[Marc G. Fournier]

I just tried to switch from IDE -> SATA, using:

#!/bin/sh
VBoxManage storagectl $1 --name 'IDE Controller' --remove
VBoxManage storagectl $1 --name "SATA Controller" --add sata
VBoxManage storageattach $1 --storagectl "SATA Controller" --device 0 --port 0 --type hdd --medium /vm/${1}/hdd0.vdi
VBoxHeadless -startvm $1 &

The first one I did it on, I notice an ~20MB/s improvement in write operations, based on running 'iozone 1024' … tried it on a test VM I created for this purposes, so nothing else was running in it … but no problems …

So, moved over to a more production (not mission critical) box, everything rebooted fine, then ran 'svnup' in order to download latest -STABLE code, and build a new kernel … after several minutes, my Guest console (ala vnc) started to spew CAM: Command timeout errors:

 

Tried to do a 'VBoxManage controlvm <name> poweroff', and it haves trying to power down also:

# VBoxManage controlvm monitor.openstudent.ca poweroff
0%...10%...20%…
===

kill'd the process from the command line, restarted and it appeared to come up fine … 

has anyone seen something like this with SATA?  I've never seen anything like this with IDE … 

Host: FreeBSD 9.1-STABLE #2: Thu Mar 28 19:41:23 UTC 2013
Guest: FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE #0 r243825: Tue Dec  4 09:23:10 UTC 2012