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satalink(4) on sparc64



Hello, it's getting difficult to get hold of old SCSI disks, so I installed a cheap SATA PCI card
into Sun Ultra 10. It is using satalink driver, but I/O speed is lower than what I expected.
I get about 30 MBytes/sec writing and reading. I also tried writing to a /dev/rwd1b partition
to bypass file system, but got around 32 MBytes/sec. The old SCSI disk could manage
around 30-40 MBytes/sec.

I've heard that some PC cards perform internal initialization during BIOS boot and enable
various performance features, etc. This doesn't happen on sparc64, since there is no 
x86 BIOS. Does anyone know if the same applies to cards with satalink driver? Wikipedia
says bandwidth for 32-bit PCI bus is around 133 MB/s. Not sure if the issue is with the
driver or the actual hardware.


Writing to disk:
$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=out bs=1m count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1048576000 bytes transferred in 35.111 secs (29864600 bytes/sec)
       35.12 real         0.04 user        25.43 sys

Reading from disk:
$ time dd if=out of=/dev/null bs=1m
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1048576000 bytes transferred in 34.464 secs (30425255 bytes/sec)
       34.49 real         0.03 user        30.22 sys

Output of dmesg:
satalink0 at pci2 dev 1 function 0: Silicon Image SATALink 3114 (rev. 0x02)
satalink0: 33MHz PCI bus
satalink0: bus-master DMA support present
satalink0: using ivec 10 for native-PCI interrupt
atabus2 at satalink0 channel 0
atabus3 at satalink0 channel 1
atabus4 at satalink0 channel 2
atabus5 at satalink0 channel 3

satalink0: port 3: device present, speed: 1.5Gb/s

wd1 at atabus5 drive 0
wd1: <SAMSUNG HM251HI>
wd1: drive supports 16-sector PIO transfers, LBA48 addressing
wd1: 232 GB, 484521 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 488397168 sectors
wd1: drive supports PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 6 (Ultra/133)
wd1(satalink0:3:0): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 6 (Ultra/133) (using DMA)


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