Very slow writing to SATA disk

[Mikhail Teterin]

> Ask the maintainer to get it [ataidle -mi] fixed, but be warned experience
> says it might hose your data...

The maintainer did not break it. An incompatible change to the API did :) You 
are, probably, in the best position to show us, how the new API should be 
used.

> Now, you say read speed is OK, but write speed isnt, is that on the  
> raw disk device or though the filesystem ?

Everething is through the filesystem -- as stated in my original e-mail in 
this thread. There is no other activity, when a single cp reads the huge file 
from a SCSI disk (da1) to the IDE (ad8).

According to `systat -vm', da1 is barely breaking a sweat, while ad8 is at 
99-101% throughput at 7Mb/second.

Soft-updates are on. The filesystem is almost empty. The box has a single 
dual-core Opteron-275 with 2Gb of RAM.

The SATA controller is your "favorite":

atapci1: <SiI 3114 SATA150 controller> port 
0xac00-0xac07,0xa480-0xa483,0xa400-0xa407,0xa080-0xa083,0xa000-0xa00f mem 0
xbe6fbc00-0xbe6fbfff irq 25 at device 5.0 on pci3

	-mi