I've recently upgraded to an Abit nforce2 NF7-S (v2.0) motherboard, running serial ATA drives (Maxtor 120GB & WD Raptor 36GB) via the onboard SiI6112 controller. I got the usual SATA problems, i.e. DMA wasn't set correctly, but these were corrected using:
echo max_kb_per_request:15 > /proc/ide/hde/settings
hdparm -d1 -X66 /dev/hde
early on in rc.sysinit file (now I get 55 MBytes/sec!).
However, in addition to these, every so often I get a full system lock up, apparently as a result of large scale SATA drive access (usually after 10s of MBs to GBs of data transfer). I have tried installing Mandrake on my old parallel ATA RAID 5 system (detected as SCSI), and even though it does reduce the number of crashes, I still get a crash once in a while as I'm using the SATA drives.
I'm guessing it's a kernel issue, relating to the SATA drivers. Does anyone have a fix?
Cheers,
-Karl
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