Read / write timeouts on SATA disks connected to ICH9

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 11:16:33PM +0200, Pieter de Boer wrote:
> >Attached the SMART output of both disks I replaced about a month ago. It
> >appears I replaced perfectly fine drives with the current disks with
> >errors ;(  One of the old disks is in a USB-enclosure now, so 'da0'.

Regarding the Western Digital RE3 disk (serial WD-WMASY5474089):

The disk looks fine.  The only thing of interest here is the
temperature, which is extremely high (47C).  If this is the drive which
is located in an (non-fan-cooled) enclosure, that would explain it.
There are no UDMA/CRC errors, so I'm not of the belief that there were
bad cables in use either.  Finally, there's no sign of the disk powering
on/off excessively either.  In summary, I can't explain how this disk
would fall off the bus given its condition.

Regarding the Western Digital RE3 disk (serial WD-WMASY5474727):

Similar to the first RE3 disk; everything here looks great, including
disk temperature.

I do wish the FreeBSD ATA layer would give full diagnostic messages when
encountering these conditions.  The request buffer could be printed, and
the response (error) could also be printed.  SCSI CAM's error output is
what I'd be hoping for (sans SK/ASC/ASCQ, which AFAIK ATA doesn't have).
Yes, I know this is available if you use ahci.ko, but this isn't
available to the OP.

Anyway, if heavy disk/controller load appears to be causing these
problems, you could have power-related issues.  Possibly the combination
of two disks + heavy I/O causes enough power draw that the ICH9 starts
to behave oddly.  Voltages which deviate too much can cause odd things
to happen to hardware.  If you have the time/money, you might try
replacing the PSU in your system to see if there's any improvement; your
BIOS should be able to provide you Hardware Monitoring statistics
(voltages).  Write these down before and after the PSU swap.  You don't
need to go crazy and buy a 1000W PSU or anything, but 450-750W is pretty
normal these days.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                   jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |