Re: SATA write woes

Jason Andresen wrote:
> Running 5.2-RELEASE I've had some trouble with a pair of SATA drives I 
> attached to the system.  Whenever I'm doing heavy writing to the drives, 
> they occasionally freeze the system for a couple of moments and spit out 
> a message like:
> 
> ad6: TIMEOUT - WRITE_DMA retrying (2 retries left) LBA=298264960
> ad4: TIMEOUT - WRITE_DMA retrying (2 retries left) LBA=299205856
> ad4: TIMEOUT - WRITE_DMA retrying (2 retries left) LBA=89954144
> ad6: TIMEOUT - WRITE_DMA retrying (2 retries left) LBA=92024064
> 
> to the console.
> 
> The controller is:
> 
> atapci0: <SiI 3112 SATA150 controller> port 
> 0xc000-0xc00f,0xbc00-0xbc03,0xb800-0xb807,0xb400-0xb403,0xb000-0xb007 
> mem 0xde002000-0xde0021ff irq 10 at device 11.0 on pci1
> atapci0: [MPSAFE]
> ata2: at 0xde002000 on atapci0
> ata2: [MPSAFE]
> ata3: at 0xde002000 on atapci0
> ata3: [MPSAFE]
> 
> The disks are:
> 
> GEOM: create disk ad4 dp=0xc5f33660
> ad4: 194481MB <Maxtor 6Y200M0> [395136/16/63] at ata2-master UDMA100
> GEOM: create disk ad6 dp=0xc5f33360
> ad6: 194481MB <Maxtor 6Y200M0> [395136/16/63] at ata3-master UDMA100
> GEOM: create disk ar0 dp=0xc5f3b1e0
> ar0: 388961MB <ATA RAID0 array> [49585/255/63] status: READY subdisks:
>  disk0 READY on ad4 at ata2-master
>  disk1 READY on ad6 at ata3-master
> 
> They are in a RAID0 array created using the builtin software RAID in ata.
> 
> Is this a hardware issue?  I don't have much spare SATA equipment to 
> swap around for testing purposes.

Yes, this is a "feature" of the broken silicon in the Sii3112 chip...

-- 
-Søren