Serial ATA drive in UDMA33 mode, nForce 4 chipset

Hans Nieser h.nieser at xs4all.nl
Mon Oct 31 16:08:09 PST 2005


Hi list,

I have an ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard (which has an nForce4 chipset) 
and use a 200GB Western Digital Serial ATA hard disk in a box with FreeBSD 
5.4-RELEASE-p8 on it. For some reason, this disk is using the UDMA33 mode. 
I have come to understand that it should be able to use a much faster 
mode. I placed the output of pciconf -lv online here: 
http://pastebin.com/412798 . The relevant lines from dmesg:

   ------------------------------------------------------------------------
   atapci0: <nVidia nForce4 UDMA133 controller> port
0xf000-0xf00f,0x376,0x170-0x177,0x3f6,0x1f0-0x1f7 at device 6.0 on pci0
   ata0: channel #0 on atapci0
   ata1: channel #1 on atapci0
   atapci1: <GENERIC ATA controller> port 
0xd800-0xd80f,0xb70-0xb73,0x970-0x977,0xbf0-0xbf3,0x9f0-0x9f7 irq 20 at 
device 7.0 on pci0
   ata2: channel #0 on atapci1
   ata3: channel #1 on atapci1
   atapci2: <GENERIC ATA controller> port 
0xc400-0xc40f,0xb60-0xb63,0x960-0x967,0xbe0-0xbe3,0x9e0-0x9e7 irq 22 at 
device 8.0 on pci0
   ata4: channel #0 on atapci2
   ata5: channel #1 on atapci2
   ad8: 190782MB <WDC WD2000JD-00HBB0/08.02D08> [387621/16/63] at 
ata4-master UDMA33
   ------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have tried - without success - to change the mode to UDMA133 (and slower 
modes, down to UDMA33) manually as follows:

   ------------------------------------------------------------------------
   root at aphax:~# atacontrol list
   ATA channel 0:
       Master: acd0 <FREECOM DVD+W-BR 4/1.34> ATA/ATAPI revision 0
       Slave:       no device present
   ATA channel 1:
       Master:      no device present
       Slave:       no device present
   ATA channel 2:
       Master:      no device present
       Slave:       no device present
   ATA channel 3:
       Master:      no device present
       Slave:       no device present
   ATA channel 4:
       Master:  ad8 <WDC WD2000JD-00HBB0/08.02D08> Serial ATA v1.0
       Slave:       no device present
   ATA channel 5:
       Master:      no device present
       Slave:       no device present

   root at aphax:~# atacontrol mode 4
   Master = UDMA33
   Slave  = BIOSPIO

   root at aphax:~# atacontrol mode 4 udma6 biospio
   Master = UDMA33
   Slave  = BIOSPIO
   ------------------------------------------------------------------------

After some googling I found a previous mailinglist post, one was about so 
called 'MKIII' patches, which I was going to give a try, when I read 
another post from earlier this year from someone with the same chipset 
with the exact same issue: 
<http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2005-May/050522.html>
And he's had no success with the patches.

So now I'm wondering what I should do... Should I try those patches 
anyway? (If so, does anyone know of a guide for someone who has never 
applied any patches before?) Is there perhaps by now another solution for 
this, or should I just switch to 6.0RC1 (or final, which I understand 
should be released very soon)?

Hans Nieser


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