Re: SATA command timeouts

[Sven Riedel <sr@gimp.org>]

On Sat, Jul 08, 2006 at 03:00:37PM +0200, Sven Riedel wrote:
> Hi,
> I hooked up new SATA disks to a machine yesterday and set up a software raid.
> After copying roughly 25 GB of data onto the array all attached drives
> reported command timeouts and wouldn't recover. Only a reboot would help. 
> I tried the same again, this time the drives would timeout after 60 GB of data
> written. I exchanged the CPU, but the same thing occurs. 

Well, seems the second CPU was defunct. After switching back to the first CPU
the hard system crashes stopped occurring.


> My
> next test will be doing write-heavy operations on all four drives
> simulaneously, but without gathering them into a raid array.

Well, it looks like the problem can be reproduced most reliably only when all
four drives are under load. It happens even sooner when they are gathered into
a raid array (I only tested level 5 - could be that the background "rebuild"
after creation is adding additional load which triggers the problem sooner).

Just to rule out an insufficient power supply, I hooked the drives up to a
completely independent PSU and the drives still all suddenly trigger a
command-timeout after a while.

Regs,
Sven

-- 
Sven Riedel                      sr@gimp.org