5.2RC1 Read+Write data corruption (with SeagateBarracuda ATA V120G (ST3120023A) + VIA 8237)

[Peter Wemm]

On Thursday 18 December 2003 05:49 am, Ion-Mihai Tetcu wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 13:19:39 +0100 (CET)
>
> Soren Schmidt <sos at spider.deepcore.dk> wrote:
> > It seems Ion-Mihai Tetcu wrote:
> > > > Hmm, there has been some trouble with a certain model of
> > > > Seagate 40G drives (bad firmware) so that might be something
> > > > you could look into, otherwise I have no idea...
> > >
> > > Any info on that ? After all, as log as it works on win I will
> > > have to be very convincing to change it, if that is the case.
> >
> > Not really, check Seagate support if an update exist for your drive
> > ?
>
> Hmm... I assume that the 3.33 from ad0: <ST3120023A/3.33> is the
> firmware revision, am I right ?

We have hideous problems with this firmware version at work.  The older 
firmware revisions are ok.  The problem is much worse under 4.x than 
5.x for us though, which makes it a bit harder to track down.

I'm pretty sure rev 3.21 is another revision that we have problems with. 
3.19 seems to work.  So does 3.12.

The really bizzare thing is that the corruption doesn't seem to be 
random.  I did a fresh system install, did a cvsup, and got an 
explosion.  The state of the fs was so bad it wasn't funny.  I nuked 
it, reinstalled using the same CD/options/etc and did the same cvsup 
again.  Again, boom!  The really bizzare thing is that the fsck carnage 
was almost exactly the same, if not completely identical.  The same 
block numbers were dup alloc'ed, the same directories trashed, etc.

We've seen it on:
  Intel ICH4 and ICH5
  AMD 8111
  nVidia nForce3-Pro150
  CMD 649
  Serverworks CSB5.

Also, it was significantly worse *before* ataNG went in, and its much 
worse on RELENG_4 than 5.x for us.

Something else just occurred to me..  I think all the problems we've 
been seeing are on *fast* machines.  (p4/xeon/amd64).  I wonder if
that is something significant?  I'll see if I can confirm this.
-- 
Peter Wemm - peter at wemm.org; peter at FreeBSD.org; peter at yahoo-inc.com
"All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5