Re: libata interface fatal error

[Tejun Heo <htejun@gmail.com>]

Florian Effenberger wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>> The controller being ich8, I'm pretty sure it isn't a driver problem.
> 
> I think so, too. The Intel chipsets have shown to be very good in the past.
> 
>> Do the errors occur on all four drives?  Also, if things work after
>> speed is downgraded to 1.5Gbps, it doesn't really matter.  There's no
>> noticeable performance difference for single disk anyway.
> 
> Yes, they do occur on all drives, as far as I know. With 1.5Gbps, the
> error doesn't occur much as often and not under normal circumstances,
> only when doing a real hard stress test.

Hmmm... Can you use a separate PSU to power two of the four drives and
see what happens?  Just power up a PSU as directed in the following
webpage and connect two of the harddrives to the PSU.

  http://modtown.co.uk/mt/article2.php?id=psumod

> Would it make sense to downgrade to 1.5 Gbps via a boot option?

I don't know.  Till now all the problem cases have been isolated to a
specific controller / drive combination (sata_promise and newer seagate
drives) or hardware configuration problem (most of them being PSU
issues), so I don't think we need such option yet.  If you have a
problematic hardware which pukes on 3.0Gbps, libata should do the right
thing after complaining a bit which IMHO isn't too bad.

-- 
tejun