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

[Michael C. Shultz]

On Wednesday 19 October 2005 21:15, Brooks Davis wrote:
> 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

Why does the SII3112 work better in FreeBSD 5.4 than in 6.0?  I have
a Highpoint 1820 on order but it still bugs me having to toss hardware that
worked in 5.4 inorder to keep current.

-Mike