Re: Data corruption with sata_sil (Sil 3112)

[Tejun Heo <htejun@gmail.com>]

Hello, Simon, Jim.

Jim Paris wrote:
>> I've been having problems with Sil 3112 cards I purchased for additional
>> SATA ports resulting in read data corruption, about 3-5 instances over
>> 2 GB of data, 100% reproducible.
> ..
>> I just rebuilt the entire box with the remains of another (went from
>> A7V8X (VIA) to A7N8X (NVidia), new CPU, new RAM, new power supply),
>> thinking the problem was related to the motherboard.  The issue followed
>> to the new box.
> 
> Have you tried different disks?  I recently spent a long time trying
> to track down the same sort of problem and it ended up being a bad
> HD (not a media failure, so SMART didn't report it).

Hmm... that's interesting.

>> This new motherboard has an onboard Sil 3112 as well.  The old onboard
>> was VIA SATA, which did not corrupt anything.  The Sil 3112 onboard now
>> does too.
> 
> Maybe the VIA controller was only 1.5 Gbps and your 3112 controllers
> are running at 3.0 Gbps?  Some drives have a jumper that lets you
> limit their operation to 1.5, which you could try.

3112 doesn't to 3.0 Gbps and SATA auto-negotiates transfer speed when
PHY goes online.  The jumper helps detection on some dump controllers
but shouldn't cause data corruption.

>> Scipt used to md5sum to find corruption:
>>
>> 	find $* -type f -print0 | sort -z | xargs -0 md5sum
> 
> Can you figure out the nature of the corruption?  Flipped bit, entire
> blocks corrupted, etc?  Maybe make two big identical files and use
> "cmp -l" to see how they read differently.

Yeap, please.

-- 
tejun