pitiful performance of an SATA150 drive

[Mikhail T.]

Hello!

I installed a new 500Gb SATA drive into my 6.1 system and am greatly
disappointed with its performance. Although straight reading is
Ok at around 32Mb/s, the writing is never more than 7Mb/s (as reported
by `systat 1 -vm' while running `cat < /dev/zero > /dev/ad8').

I reported this a few months ago (running 6.0 then), and one of the
suggestions was, the drive is bad. Well, I'm seeing the same with its
replacement...

Also, KNOPPIX-4.0.2 can write to the drive at 22Mb/s (using dd). Here
are the relevant dmesg entries:

atapci1: <SiI 3114 SATA150 controller> port 0xac00-0xac07,0xa880-0xa883,0xa800-0xa807,0xa480-0xa483,0xa400-0xa40f mem 0xbe5dfc00-0xbe5dffff irq 25 at device 5.0 on pci3
atapci1: Reserved 0x10 bytes for rid 0x20 type 4 at 0xa400
atapci1: [MPSAFE]
atapci1: Reserved 0x400 bytes for rid 0x24 type 3 at 0xbe5dfc00
ata2: <ATA channel 0> on atapci1
ata3: <ATA channel 1> on atapci1
ata4: <ATA channel 2> on atapci1
ata4: SATA connect ready time=0ms
ata4: sata_connect devices=0x1<ATA_MASTER>
ata4: [MPSAFE]
ata5: <ATA channel 3> on atapci1
ad8: 476940MB <HDS725050KLA360 K2AOA11A> at ata4-master SATA150
ad8: 976773168 sectors [969021C/16H/63S] 16 sectors/interrupt 1 depth queue
ad8: Silicon Image check3 failed
ad8: Adaptec check1 failed
ad8: LSI (v3) check1 failed
ad8: LSI (v2) check1 failed
ad8: FreeBSD check1 failed
GEOM: new disk ad8

Attached is the output of `atacontrol'. I tried using `ataidle' to set
the drive into the most and the least economical power and acoustic
management modes, but its write-performance remains the same. Something
is very wrong :-(

The controller is, of course, by Silicon Image (Soren's "favorite"), but
"Silicon Image check3 failed". Is that the problem?

	-mi
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Protocol              Serial ATA II
device model          HDS725050KLA360
serial number         KRVN02ZAG0Z7YC
firmware revision     K2AOA11A
cylinders             16383
heads                 16
sectors/track         63
lba supported         268435455 sectors
lba48 supported       976773168 sectors
dma supported
overlap not supported

Feature                      Support  Enable    Value           Vendor
write cache                    yes	yes
read ahead                     yes	yes
Native Command Queuing (NCQ)   yes	 -	31/0x1F
Tagged Command Queuing (TCQ)   no	no	31/0x1F
SMART                          yes	yes
microcode download             yes	yes
security                       yes	no
power management               yes	yes
advanced power management      yes	yes	1/0x01
automatic acoustic management  yes	yes	128/0x80	128/0x80