Problems with PCI SATA controller (bug in ATA driver? both ATAng and ATAmkIII)

Brooks Davis brooks at one-eyed-alien.net
Wed Oct 19 21:15:22 PDT 2005


On Thu, Oct 20, 2005 at 04:30:48AM +0200, Alson van der Meulen wrote:
> (Please CC me in replies as I'm not a subscriber of this list)
> 
> Update: I tested with an i810-based mainboard (Celeron 1GHz, RTL8139
> ethernet, Promise SATAII 150 TX4 controller, 3 SATA disks in RAID 5,
> FreeBSD 6.0-RC1). It remained stable for two hours. I suspect this is
> because it has far less bandwith (iostat showed only about 3MB/s to the
> disks, as opposed to 12MB/s with the i915 mainboard). After I added a dd
> if=/dev/zero of=foo bs=128k (this increased the bandwidth usage to the
> disk to about 9MB/s according to iostat), it crashed in about 40
> minutes. This suggests that it crashes because of the large amount of
> I/O. However, it's only about 10MB/s per disk (for three disks), so it
> doesn't seem to be that exotic to me.
> 
> Since this is a completely different mainboard, it seems clearly a
> software issue to me. The built-in ICH6 controller works fine however,
> so it may be PDC*0518/SII311* specific (which basically means any PCI
> SATA controller available locally).

The SII3112 is a piece of crap that won't work reliably.  Order
something better (Soren recommends Promise cards).

-- Brooks


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