Re: sata_sil24 corruption details

[Tejun Heo <htejun@gmail.com>]

linux@horizon.com wrote:
> Three days ago, I wrote:
> 
>>I finished "badblocks -b 4096 -c 65536 -s -v -w -t random" run on 350
>>G of one drive without seeing problems, and am working on the other 5.
>>(In parallel, just to stress the driver.)
> 
> 
> My parallel -p1 badblocks runs (I shrunk the chunk size to -c 16384)
> finished on 3 of the 5 drives, but after 69 hours and I don't know how
> many passes, it's still running on one pair of drives.  Interestingly,
> the pair (sdc4 & sdd4) is connected to a single controller.
> 
> Thus, it might not be a multiple-controller issue (I don't know how
> many other people have 3 Sil3132s in a system), but perhaps an issue
> with simultaneous activity on the 2 ports of a single controller.
> 
> Is there anything else I could do to help debug this problem?  Any additional
> debugging I can enable?
> 
> It would take me a while to clean the backups off the system and move
> it outside the firewall to allow remote access if someone wants access
> to that particular hardware, but it's just an expensive bit bucket at
> the moment, so ask if it would help...

Hello, there.

I'll soon try to tackle this one.  However, I currently have only one
3124 controller and one harddisk to hook to that controller, so I cannot
reproduce your setup over here.  Here are things that I think might help
in diagnosing the problem.

* Trying other drivers
	* Trying the original driver.  I'll port the original driver
	  from sii to the current tree and post the patch.
	* Performing similar test under Windows.

* Ruling out disk problem
	* Trying other harddisks.  All harddisk drives perform error
	  detection/correction when data are read from the media, but
	  ruling out the possibility would still be helpful.

* If you have log of failed sectors, finding patterns will be helpful.
  If the errors occur at random places, it's likely that we have
  controller/driver issues.  If errors are localized over multiple runs,
  maybe the disk is at fault.

-- 
tejun