Re: sil3112a SATA Controller, current status

At 10:30 PM +0100 11/18/04, Søren Schmidt wrote:
>Garance A Drosihn wrote:
>
>>I am trying to pin down problems "FAILURE - WRITE_DMA timed out"
>>in a new PC that I have.  I had some local shop build this for me,
>>and apparently there were "a few" miscommunications in what I
>>thought I asked for, and what they actually built.
>>
>>The machine ended up with two SATA controllers:
>>    atapci0: <SiI 3112 SATA150 controller> -- on the motherboard
>>    atapci1: <VIA 6420 SATA150 controller> -- on a PCI card
>
>I think its the other way around, the VIA chip is part of the
>motherboard chipset, the SiI is a "loose" PCI compatible chip.

Ugh.  You are correct.  Somewhere along the line I got the two
mixed up.  So now have I removed the PCI-based SATA card, and
connected the Western Digital hard disk to the on-board SATA.
I have just done a complete buildworld/installworld cycle for
5.3-STABLE.  I did not see a single WRITE_DMA time-out message.
I was *always* seeing at least a few of those before, especially
if I specified -j2 (or more) on a `make buildworld'.  Many times
those messages were benign, but sometimes they would trigger a
failure in buildworld, or even more severe problems (including
system panics -- which would then leave the file system in a
corrupted state...).

>>The hard disk is connected to the PCI card.  Would that be
>>more reliable quality hardware than the SiI3112?
>
>I'd say so.

You are obviously correct...

Now I will have to go to the place that built this, and ask them
why on earth they added a PCI card for SATA which was *worse* than
what was on the motherboard!  When I ordered this, I expected it
to use the on-board SATA.  I never asked for a SATA card.

>>Also, the disk is a Western Digital WDC WD1200JD-00GBB0/02.05D02
>>120-gig drive.  I *thought* I was ordering a Seagate drive, but it is
>>quite likely that there was some confusion on that.  Would that Western
>>Digital SATA drive be a problem?  I do have a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7
>>hard drive that I could use (after shuffling a few things around).
>
>From observation I'd say that those drives that are native SATA
>devices has significantly less problems than those that aren't.

Well, I am sure that is a true statement, but it does not answer the
question I was trying to ask...  :-)   I did not know anything about
this western digital drive that I ended up with, so I didn't know if
it was a native SATA drive.

But looking around the web for awhile, it looks like this model of
Western Digital is not a native SATA drive.  So I think I will replace
it just to avoid any further hassles, even though I did not get any
errors with this drive once I was using the right controller.  I had
*intended* to get a Seagate SATA drive in the first place, so swamping
the drive will just get me back to what my original plans for hardware.

Thanks.  Now that I may finally be past these hardware problems, maybe
I can get back to writing some actual code!

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad_at_gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad_at_freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih_at_rpi.edu