Problems/worries with Maxtor OneTouch III RAID edition

[Anders Nordby]

Hi,

I'm trying out a Maxtor OneTuch III Turbo Edition 1 TB external
harddisk. It's a combo USB/FireWire cabinet with two disks that can be
combined into one RAID 0 or RAID 1 disk. I am using RAID 1. I've got it
plugged into an Adaptec AFW-4300 PCI firewire card (FireConnect 4300, 3
ports). The Adaptec card shows up as:

fwohci0 at pci0:13:0:      class=0x0c0010 card=0x801015c5 chip=0x8020104c
rev=0x00 hdr=0x00
    vendor   = 'Texas Instruments (TI)'
    device   = 'TSB12LV26 OHCI-Lynx PCI IEEE 1394 Host Controller'
    class    = serial bus
    subclass = FireWire

The disk comes up as:

da0 at sbp0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
da0: <Maxtor OneTouch IIIm 0308> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-4 device 
da0: 50.000MB/s transfers
da0: 476889MB (976670718 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 60794C)

When I try to write to the disk, I get around 8.3 MB/sec transfer rate:

# dd if=/dev/zero bs=64k of=./filler.dat count=163840
163840+0 records in
163840+0 records out
10737418240 bytes transferred in 1223.276930 secs (8777586 bytes/sec)

Reading the same file gives me around double that speed.

Any kind of write operation results in a lot of these messages in /var/log/messages:

Nov  6 19:47:33 pisces kernel: sbp0:0:0 Obj: Data buffer, Error:
Time-out error
Nov  6 19:47:33 pisces kernel: sbp0:0:0 sbp_scsi_status: unknown scsi
status 0x0
Nov  6 19:47:33 pisces kernel: sbp0:0:0 Obj: Data buffer, Error:
Time-out error
Nov  6 19:47:33 pisces kernel: sbp0:0:0 sbp_scsi_status: unknown scsi
status 0x0

Read operations does not give me these errors. Should I be worried about
them? Apart from my worry that I will not be able to see if a disk in
this cabinet goes broken, the syslog messages are quite annoying. :)

Cheers,

-- 
Anders.