More Adaptec 29320 + Seagate ST336607LW woes

[ian j hart]

On Friday 05 December 2003 8:33 pm, Don Lewis wrote:
> On  5 Dec, ict technician wrote:
> > On Thursday 04 December 2003 6:41 am, Justin T. Gibbs wrote:
> >> Can you try to reproduce this issue with the driver posted here:
> >>
> >> http://people.freebsd.org/~gibbs/aic7xxx-20031203.tar.gz
> >>
> >> I found and fixed a few bugs that *may* be the root cause of your
> >> issue.  I'm still trying to replicate this problem locally so that
> >> I can independently verify the fix.
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >> Justin
> >
> > Here are the results so far.
> >
> > Firstly the box has run fault free all week.
> >
> > I had squid hitting the default resource limits so I decided to put the
> > increased values back in, before I started. Straight away I got a card
> > dump. Typical!
> >
> > I built a new kernel, removed the tags depth fix and enabled soft
> > updates. It boots, it builds a new kernel, yahoo!
> >
> > Now I thrash the living daylights out of the drive and it dies after
> > 20mins or so, but frankly I'm not too bothered. I had to try really hard
> > to kill it. This is just *so much* better.
>
> I've been meaning to suggest that if you haven't done so already, use
> "camcontrol modepage" to set the WCE bit to 0 which will disable write
> caching on the drive.  In the testing that I've done, I haven't seen any
> significant performance penalty in doing this if tagged command queuing
> and softupdates are in use.  It is also safer for soft updates because
> the drive no longer lies about when write data reaches stable storage.

I thought tagged queuing needed WCE.

>
> Also, at least with Seagate drives, I have observed that the drive will
> dynamically reduce the number of tagged commands that it will accept as
> its write cache fills.  Who knows what sort of subtle bugs that might
> tickle ...
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-- 
ian j hart

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