Promise SATA300 TX4 card issues

Dag-Erling Smørgrav des at des.no
Mon Jul 2 16:10:43 UTC 2007


Nathan Butcher <n-butcher at fusiongol.com> writes:
> I've been having problems with my ZFS pool consisting of 4 drives hooked
> up to my Prmoise SATA 300TX4 controller. It had been working fine until
> to around the 19th of this month, and then I started seeing error
> messages whenever I tried to write lots of data to ZFS..... followed by
> a nasty lockup with no other debugging information of which to speak of.

This is a recurring problem with ZFS and ata disks.  It appears that the
ata driver doesn't like the ATA_FLUSHCACHE command very much, and ZFS
uses it a lot.  Turning off atime helps, as does turning off ata write
caching (hw.ata.wc=0 in loader.conf) - I still get timeouts and
transient hangs once in a while, but my server no longer crashes:

des at dwp ~% zpool list
NAME                    SIZE    USED   AVAIL    CAP  HEALTH     ALTROOT
raid                   1.45T    298G   1.16T    20%  ONLINE     -
des at dwp ~% uptime
 6:09PM  up 31 days,  5:02, 4 users, load averages: 0.95, 0.71, 0.66

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no


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