The read and write timeouts story, next stage...

[Teemu Rinta-aho <teemu%rinta-aho.org@localhost>]

Hi all,

I have been reporting here my battle with the read and write timeouts
from SATA drives. Now I managed to try the drives on a 3rd PC, where
completely everything is different from the previous 2 PCs with which
I have had the problem. And the problem is still there! (The third PC
is about one month old, with Asus P7P55D motherboard, Core i7 860 CPU,
750W PSU etc.)

It seems that I can reproduce write timeouts with the Intel Mini-ITX
by building the NetBSD source. On Core 2 I get read timeouts when
I let the raidframe do a parity check on the RAID-1 set. On Core i7
I got a write timeout when I did a rebuild of the other drive in the
RAID-1 set.

Now I am bored of finding new pieces of hardware to try to make the
problem go away and was wondering if anyone has a similar setup that
I am having and could try if he or she can reproduce the problem.

My setup is: two 1TB SATA2 drives configured to RAID-1 using
raidframe. It doesn't seem to make a difference whether the driver
is piixide or ahcisata, I have tried to change BIOS settings etc.
I have all the NetBSD partitions on that RAID device, including
root. Then by either building a NetBSD release or causing the
raidframe to do parity check (by e.g. pressing the reset button)
I can reproduce the problem.

The only common nominators in my tests are: the power coming from
the wall, the UPS, and the NetBSD code.

I will try -current with the Core i7 machine next.

BR,
Teemu