pitiful performance of an SATA150 drive

[Marc Santhoff]

Am Dienstag, den 27.03.2007, 08:58 -0400 schrieb Stephen Clark:
> Marc Santhoff wrote:
> 
> >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).
> >  
> >
> Are you referring to how many time the cable can be plugged in and 
> removed? If so

Yes, sorry for my lousy english ...

> what is the number?

I don't remember the exakt count but it has only two digits. Expect 15
or 50 or so. But IIRC this was SATA 1 and may have changed with SATA 2
having a locking clip at the plug.

Marc