pitiful performance of an SATA150 drive

[Clayton Milos]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Marc Santhoff" <M.Santhoff at t-online.de>
To: "Mikhail Teterin" <mi+kde at aldan.algebra.com>
Cc: <stable at freebsd.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2007 8:22 AM
Subject: Re: pitiful performance of an SATA150 drive


> Am Montag, den 26.03.2007, 14:36 -0400 schrieb Mikhail Teterin:
>> Over a year later this remains a problem -- exactly as described below...
>>
>> No other SATA devices are present -- the only other IDE device is the DVD
>> drive. My main disks are SCSI.
>>
>> What's MUCH worse is that the (slowly) written data is also often 
>> corrupted...
>> I use the drive to store our vast collection of photos and the backups. 
>> Every
>> once in a while I encounter a corrupt JPEG file, and the backups are 
>> _always_
>> corrupt somewhere. Doing something like:
>>
>> dump 0auChf 16 0 - /home | bzip2 -9 > /store/home.0.bz2
>>
>> always produces a corrupt file (as per ``bzip2 -t''). I used to blame the
>> drive's temperature, but it now sits in its own enclosure and stays under 
>> 40
>> Celsius.
>>
>> When the drive is accessed, there are (according to `systat -vm') many
>> thousands of interrupts 17 -- on my system these are shared between pcm0 
>> and
>> ehci0. Why are these triggered by accessing SATA is unclear, but the 
>> Intr's
>> share of the CPU time is often above 80% of one processor's total (I have 
>> 4
>> processors).
>>
>> As I mentioned a year ago, Knoppix was accessing the same drive at much 
>> higher
>> speeds, so I don't believe, the problem is with the hardware...
>>
>> Please, advise. Thanks!
>
> FWIW: You could try cleaning the connectors and use a fresh new cable
> for the connection (the spec has a very small value for plugging the
> connectors at the cable).
>
> I had massive problems and got rid of them that way ...
>
> Marc
>


Personally, I think the SATA cables are the biggest load of rubbish ever 
invented. They give endless headaches, always come lose, prone to vibration 
and are not strong enough to support the weight of the SATA cable itself.
The ones that come with the Areca cards have clips that help a little.

They should have used a FCH connector or something like that that has been 
proven in the field for years instead of inventing some flimsy rubbish that 
isn't reliable. If you can, glue the cables on the drive side at least so 
that they don't give you headaches.


-Clay