Read / write timeouts on SATA disks connected to ICH9

[Terry Kennedy]

> Interesting. Which version of FreeBSD is this system running? I guess
> you didn't experience any of the timeouts I'm seeing?

  8-STABLE as of the 11th of this month, or thereabouts. No, I've never
seen a disk timeout on that box.

> 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).

 Does your system have hot-swap drive bays and the SAS backplane? If it
at least has hot-swap bays, then you could always add the backplane,
cable, and controller.

  I'm using the hardware mirroring on the SAS 6/iR card (with a pair of
WD3000HLFS drives, since the previous owner took the factory drives out
before selling the system).

  I haven't tried taking one of those drives and seeing if it will boot
on a standalone SATA port. I have removed both drives, installed a scratch
drive, and installed Windows on it to run one of the Dell update install-
ers (not all of them come in DOS or Linux flavors). The controller didn't
mind the swap a bit (or the swap back to the 2 RAID drives). That's a lot
better than the old amr-based RAID cards.

        Terry Kennedy             http://www.tmk.com
        terry at tmk.com             New York, NY USA