Subject: Re: IBM drives vs Adaptec controllers/driver [was Re: 10G IBM ide hard disk]
To: NetBSD-current Discussion List <current-users@netbsd.org>
From: Sean Doran <smd@ebone.net>
List: current-users
Date: 01/23/1999 13:28:26
woods@most.weird.com (Greg A. Woods) writes:

> I enabled both AHC_TAGENABLE and AHC_SCBPAGING_ENABLE with much more
> appreciable results.

AHC_TAGENABLE where it works is great.

I have yet to have my controller not puke when AHC_SCBPAGING_ENABLE is on.

> Quantum Viking drives.

I have one of these beasts:

sd1 at scsibus0 targ 8 lun 0: <QUANTUM, XP34550W, LYK8> SCSI2 0/direct fixed

and it *is* faster with AHC_TAGENABLE, but will tend to
hang irretrievably under heavy load; this was tracked down
some time ago to a protocol deadlock between the driver
and the drive.  I don't think it's been fixed -- the ahc
driver is pretty spaghettish.

> A dual channel chip!  Nice!  Too bad you need Justin's new driver for
> that, and it needs SCAM.  ;-)

It was a frill that came on the motherboard.   There's
still the old AHA2940UW to use in the interim.

The dual-channel chip is kinda pointless with one disk.

If I had the motherboard at home (where I have lots more disks)
then it'd be neat-o to have it working.

> I booted FreeBSD-3.0-RELEASE on my development machine (with the Quantum
> Vikings) and they (along with the IBM CD-ROM too I think) were reported
> as negotiating 20MHz, 16-bit transfers.

Interesting.

> Maybe there's some difference in the aic7880 firmware on your adaptec
> card that's not in my on-board version....

Maybe.  A colleague of mine was having pretty much the
same problem (10MHz instead of 20) with his on-motherboard
controller, whereas my PCI card controller negotiates
20MHz just fine.

> What are your iozone and/or Bonnie numbers for those DGHS09U's?

I'll get back to you on this.

> Do you get good numbers for raw disk-to-disk copies with  dd?

Dunno, don't care.  -:)

	Sean.