Read / write timeouts on SATA disks connected to ICH9

[Pieter de Boer]

Hi Jeremy,

<SNIP: both old disks were fine>
> 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.
As this is a 19" 1U box, I'd need to buy a replacement PSU from Dell or 
a reseller. Not too expensive, but I'd like to avoid that.

While looking through the CVSweb of RELENG_8, I found that ATA timeouts 
have been raised in 8 recently. On 
http://wiki.freebsd.org/JeremyChadwick/ATA_issues_and_troubleshooting 
and other URLs, like 
http://linux-bsd-sharing.blogspot.com/2009/03/howto-fix-sata-dma-timeout-issues-on.html, 
I found that increasing the timeout might help. So that's what I'll try 
next time it happens again. If that still doesn't work, I can take a 
better look at the voltage levels.

-- 
Pieter