Promise SATA150 TX2+ or buggy seagate hdd -> no DMA?

eNTi · Last edited by eNTi on Mon May 08, 2006 6:02 am; edited 1 time in total

so i've finnally come behind the weird slowdowns of my network and copying. i obiously got no DMA on my 3rd disc, which is connected to a pci promise sata controler.

my hdparm -tT test results of all 3 hdd's:

I.C.Wiener · Posted: Sun May 07, 2006 10:58 pm Post subject:

How did you manage to plug 3 drives into a 2 port sata controller?

May I assume you are using another controller for the 3rd drive? A Sil3112 (Silicon Image) maybe? Your Seagate drive came with a buggy firmware which caused data corruption when used together with certain silicon image controllers and was thus added to a blacklist (since kernel 2.6.9). As a result writing performance suffers badly (< 15MB sec.) while reading shouldn't be affected at all (at least on a recent kernel >=2.6.13).

I suggest you check dmesg and grep for something like "seagate errata fix" or "quirk_mod15write"

eNTi · Posted: Mon May 08, 2006 5:55 am Post subject:

yeah that's right. i've got 2 drives on my onboard via controller and 1 drive is connected to the onboard Promise controller. i was relativly sure, that my promise controller was to blame for the slowdown and now you tell me that's the drive? damn. i'm not even sure which drive is connected to which controller any more, i guess i would have found out, if i'd remove one from the lvm and realized, that it wouldn't matter which drive was connected to which controller. well good to know, that it might be my hdd. thx.

so you say my hdd got a buggy firmware? how can i FIX that?

the other two drivers are connected to a:

simeli · Posted: Mon May 08, 2006 9:51 am Post subject:

DMA is always enabled on sata disks. You don't have to do that manually.
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eNTi · Posted: Mon May 08, 2006 10:04 am Post subject:

Paapaa · l33t Joined: 14 Aug 2005 Posts: 955 Location: Finland

1. First make sure it is the drive, not the controller. So if the slow one is now connected to the onboard controller, connect it to external and vice versa.
2. I believe "dmesg" doesn't show messages from modules. Do you have your SATA stuff built into the kernel or as modules? If modules, you have to search the errors elsewhere (I don't know where) or you could built them into kernel to see the messages with dmesg. In both ways you should see the messages during boot.

eNTi · Posted: Mon May 08, 2006 11:17 am Post subject:

it's the controller.

i have to load the controller as a module, otherwise it will be first loaded up before the via controller and i can't boot any more.
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I.C.Wiener · Posted: Mon May 08, 2006 11:51 am Post subject:

Ok, seems this hasn't anything to do with the blacklist. This should only affect sil-controllers.

Have you already tried another pci-slot for the promise controller? Might be just an irq-conflict or something.

I have the very same seagte hdd with even the same firmware revision and it works great with a promise SataII TX4 but it had severe problems with my onboard sil3112.

Paapaa · l33t Joined: 14 Aug 2005 Posts: 955 Location: Finland

eNTi · Posted: Mon May 08, 2006 12:10 pm Post subject:

the promise controller is not built in. it's a pci card.
_________________
If you fall off a cliff, you might as well try to fly. After all, you got nothing to lose.

-- John Sheridan - Babylon 5, Season 4

Paapaa · l33t Joined: 14 Aug 2005 Posts: 955 Location: Finland

eNTi · Posted: Mon May 08, 2006 12:14 pm Post subject:

I.C.Wiener · Posted: Mon May 08, 2006 6:16 pm Post subject:

This will give you a list which irq is used by what device(s):