Read / write timeouts on SATA disks connected to ICH9

[Pieter de Boer]

Hi Terry,

> I have a bunch of R300's here. From one that is using the on-board SATA
> and 2 drives in a gmirror setup (very similar to the OP) after 18 hours
> of uptime:
> 
> [0:2] speedtest:~> vmstat -i
> interrupt                          total       rate
> irq23: atapci0                    254116          3
Interesting. Which version of FreeBSD is this system running? I guess 
you didn't experience any of the timeouts I'm seeing?

>   I also have another R300 with Dell's "SAS 6/iR" card (a re-branded LSI
> 1068-something, seen as "mpt" by FreeBSD). While Dell only sells that as
> part of a package deal with the hot-swap backplane and redundant power
> supplies, there's no reason you couldn't pick one up on eBay and add it
> yourself. You'll need some sort of breakout cable to get from the big
> connector on the SAS 6 to individual SATA ports.
Yeah, this R300 was bought second-hand and unfortunately the owner 
pulled the RAID card out. It's something to consider, getting one of 
those cards. Do you use the RAID-features of the drive and if so, does 
that work well? I'm a bit hesitant to use hardware raid; it would be a 
big plus if the RAID disks could also be used stand-alone if need be 
(which is easy with gmirror because of its metadata being stored in the 
drive's last sector).

Thanks,
Pieter