On Wed, Apr 19, 2000 at 11:54:10AM -0700, James T Perkins wrote:
> 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.
Yes, I am familiar with this. This drive would seem to support -m16.
But, after trying it both ways, hdparm -tT does not show much
difference, so I'll back it down. I've used the same settings on other
boards/drives without incident previously. This is the first FS
problem with this board (bought Oct) -- other than after a lockup.
There have been many of those. FWIW.
[root@feenix /tmp]# hdparm -i /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
Model=WDC WD136AA, FwRev=80.10A80, SerialNo=WD-WM6780078784
Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec SpinMotCtl Fixed DTR>5Mbs FmtGapReq }
RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=57600, SectSize=600, ECCbytes=40
BuffType=3(DualPortCache), BuffSize=2048kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16
DblWordIO=no, OldPIO=2, DMA=yes, OldDMA=0
CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=-66060037, LBA=yes, LBAsects=26564832
tDMA={min:120,rec:120}, DMA modes: mword0 mword1 mword2
IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, PIO modes: mode3 mode4
UDMA modes: mode0 mode1 *mode2 mode3 mode4
Thanks for the input.
--
Hal B
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
--
=- To unsubscribe, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the -=
=- body of "unsubscribe linux-abit". -=
