On Wed, 19 Apr 2000, Hal Burgiss wrote:
> So is it still possible there are IDE<>SMP problems? Any ideas? Just
> when I was starting to have confidence in this thing...
>
> 2ea WD HDD on IDE0 std controller (UDMA33) -u1d1c1m16
You are using more agressive settings for your disk drives than I have
been able to run without occasional massive corruption. You might want to
give the hdparm a man page a read:
-m Get/set sector count for multiple sector I/O on the
drive. A setting of 0 disables this feature. Mul
tiple sector mode (aka IDE Block Mode), is a fea
ture of most modern IDE hard drives, permitting the
transfer of multiple sectors per I/O interrupt,
rather than the usual one sector per interrupt.
When this feature is enabled, it typically reduces
operating system overhead for disk I/O by 30-50%.
On many systems, it also provides increased data
throughput of anywhere from 5% to 50%. Some
drives, however (most notably the WD Caviar
series), seem to run slower with multiple mode
enabled. Your mileage may vary. Most drives sup
port the minimum settings of 2, 4, 8, or 16 (sec
tors). Larger settings may also be possible,
depending on the drive. A setting of 16 or 32
seems optimal on many systems. Western Digital
recommends lower settings of 4 to 8 on many of
their drives, due tiny (32kB) drive buffers and
non-optimized buffering algorithms. The -i flag
can be used to find the maximum setting supported
by an installed drive (look for MaxMultSect in the
output). Some drives claim to support multiple
mode, but lose data at some settings. Under rare
circumstances, such failures can result in massive
filesystem corruption.
The only flag I'm running with right now is -d1 -- after what happened
before (not just on the bp6) I fear the results of turning on the others.
$ sudo hdparm -iv /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
multcount = 0 (off)
I/O support = 0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq = 0 (off)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
nowerr = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 8 (on)
geometry = 525/255/63, sectors = 8446032, start = 0
Model=SAMSUNG VG34323A, FwRev=GQ301-43, SerialNo=dW0902150475a9
Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec Fixed DTR>10Mbs }
RawCHS=14896/9/63, TrkSize=32256, SectSize=512, ECCbytes=4
BuffType=3(DualPortCache), BuffSize=496kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=off
DblWordIO=no, maxPIO=2(fast), DMA=yes, maxDMA=2(fast)
CurCHS=14896/9/63, CurSects=-531627904, LBA=yes
LBA CHS=931/144/63 Remapping, LBA=yes, LBAsects=8446032
tDMA={min:120,rec:120}, DMA modes: sword0 sword1 sword2 *mword0 mword1 mword2
IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, PIO modes: mode3 mode4
UDMA modes: mode0 mode1 *mode2
James
--
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For sale 1985 Camaro V8 AT Ttop http://commonhouse.net/~jamester/camaro
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