Status of ATA tagging in Stable

[Kevin Oberman]

> From: ian j hart <ianjhart at ntlworld.com>
> Date: Sat, 29 Mar 2003 19:40:55 +0000
> 
> On Saturday 29 March 2003 6:42 pm, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> > I have a P3 system running STABLE built on March 7. I installed a new
> > IBM DTLA disk drive and was distressed at its slowness, so I tried
> > turning on tagging to see if that would help. It seemed to, until...
> 
> What do you mean by *new*? These drives were renamed some long time ago.
> IIRC quality was a bit poor for early drives.
> 
> >
> > 3 AM when my periodic tasks started running. The system lost all disk
> > access and logged lots of errors (a few of which I added to the end of
> > this message).
> >
> > I rebooted the system this morning and the problem re-appeared when fsck
> > ran. I then turned off tagged queuing and the system came up normally.
> >
> > Is there some problem with the DTLA drive or is this a driver problem?
> 
> Yes, the drive could be DOA. However it's equally likely to be the controller 
> or the cable. Lots of M/Bs have suspect UDMA implementations.
> 
> My IC35L080's are fine (GigaByte 7VTXE+)
> 
> Take a look at this for starters (wrapped).
> 
> http://ssddom01.hgst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/\
> 	85256AB8006A31E587256A7800700048/$file/dtla_com2.pdf

Thanks for the poke to get my brain functioning, Ian. As you suspected,
the DTLA drive is NOT a new drive. It was manufactured in 2000 and
totally lost write capability yesterday. I have fallen back to my old
IBM drive which is reporting excessive errors, but at least generally
works and I will be returning this drive to our PC support guy who
called it "new".

I think th cable is OK as all other drives on the system are ATA100 and
all are behaving properly.

Thanks again!

R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634