Re: pitiful performance of an SATA150 drive

The 500 GB drives I have seen are SATA300, backward compatible to 
SATA150.  If your's is SATA300, you might consider replacing the controller 
with an add-on SATA300 controller.

You didn't say what brand or model your drive is.  Different models come 
with different sizes caches on the drives which effects performance.  Also 
depending on the drive read or write caching may or may NOT be 
enabled.  Usually the drive manufacturer has a utility to examine and set 
these values.

One last thing on performance of drives is the file system layout.  Which 
file system you use certainly has an effect, but so does the actual 
parameters used when the filesystem was created with newfs.  You can check 
the man page on newfs or the handbook for more specifics.

Did you load your a new version of FreeBSD onto this new drive which is 
recommended vs using a filesystem from an upgraded system from a previous 
version?

         -Derek


At 11:05 PM 2/28/2006, Mikhail T. wrote:
>Hello!
>
>I installed a new 500Gb SATA drive into my 6.1 system and am greatly
>disappointed with its performance. Although straight reading is
>Ok at around 32Mb/s, the writing is never more than 7Mb/s (as reported
>by `systat 1 -vm' while running `cat < /dev/zero > /dev/ad8').
>
>I reported this a few months ago (running 6.0 then), and one of the
>suggestions was, the drive is bad. Well, I'm seeing the same with its
>replacement...
>
>Also, KNOPPIX-4.0.2 can write to the drive at 22Mb/s (using dd). Here
>are the relevant dmesg entries:
>
>atapci1: <SiI 3114 SATA150 controller> port 
>0xac00-0xac07,0xa880-0xa883,0xa800-0xa807,0xa480-0xa483,0xa400-0xa40f mem 
>0xbe5dfc00-0xbe5dffff irq 25 at device 5.0 on pci3
>atapci1: Reserved 0x10 bytes for rid 0x20 type 4 at 0xa400
>atapci1: [MPSAFE]
>atapci1: Reserved 0x400 bytes for rid 0x24 type 3 at 0xbe5dfc00
>ata2: <ATA channel 0> on atapci1
>ata3: <ATA channel 1> on atapci1
>ata4: <ATA channel 2> on atapci1
>ata4: SATA connect ready time=0ms
>ata4: sata_connect devices=0x1<ATA_MASTER>
>ata4: [MPSAFE]
>ata5: <ATA channel 3> on atapci1
>ad8: 476940MB <HDS725050KLA360 K2AOA11A> at ata4-master SATA150
>ad8: 976773168 sectors [969021C/16H/63S] 16 sectors/interrupt 1 depth queue
>ad8: Silicon Image check3 failed
>ad8: Adaptec check1 failed
>ad8: LSI (v3) check1 failed
>ad8: LSI (v2) check1 failed
>ad8: FreeBSD check1 failed
>GEOM: new disk ad8
>
>Attached is the output of `atacontrol'. I tried using `ataidle' to set
>the drive into the most and the least economical power and acoustic
>management modes, but its write-performance remains the same. Something
>is very wrong :-(
>
>The controller is, of course, by Silicon Image (Soren's "favorite"), but
>"Silicon Image check3 failed". Is that the problem?
>
>         -mi
>
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