pitiful performance of an SATA150 drive

[Marc Santhoff]

Am Montag, den 26.03.2007, 14:36 -0400 schrieb Mikhail Teterin:
> Over a year later this remains a problem -- exactly as described below...
> 
> No other SATA devices are present -- the only other IDE device is the DVD 
> drive. My main disks are SCSI.
> 
> What's MUCH worse is that the (slowly) written data is also often corrupted... 
> I use the drive to store our vast collection of photos and the backups. Every 
> once in a while I encounter a corrupt JPEG file, and the backups are _always_ 
> corrupt somewhere. Doing something like:
> 
> 	dump 0auChf 16 0 - /home | bzip2 -9 > /store/home.0.bz2
> 
> always produces a corrupt file (as per ``bzip2 -t''). I used to blame the 
> drive's temperature, but it now sits in its own enclosure and stays under 40 
> Celsius.
> 
> When the drive is accessed, there are (according to `systat -vm') many 
> thousands of interrupts 17 -- on my system these are shared between pcm0 and 
> ehci0. Why are these triggered by accessing SATA is unclear, but the Intr's 
> share of the CPU time is often above 80% of one processor's total (I have 4 
> processors).
> 
> As I mentioned a year ago, Knoppix was accessing the same drive at much higher 
> speeds, so I don't believe, the problem is with the hardware...
> 
> Please, advise. Thanks!

FWIW: You could try cleaning the connectors and use a fresh new cable
for the connection (the spec has a very small value for plugging the
connectors at the cable).

I had massive problems and got rid of them that way ...

Marc