Subject: Re: UDMA errors with Promise in Miata
To: David Hopper <dhop@nwlink.com>
From: Michael Kukat <michael@unixiron.org>
List: port-alpha
Date: 03/30/2005 22:16:40
Hi,

On Wed, 30 Mar 2005, David Hopper wrote:
> Hmm...  I had wondered if this was fixed by now.  I had this exact
> error some two years ago with a Promise Ultra133TX2 controller.  My
> solution was to drop down to an Ultra/66 controller.  I've had success
> with both SIIG and Promise Ultra/66, but this Promise 133TX2 has been
> gathering dust until I can verify that it works...  :(

Hm, this is not really what i want, as i just bought 2 of those controllers for
my Miatas, as the onboard CMD is... "not too fast".

Just checked, the degraded UDMA2 works fine, with linear dd from raw device, it
reads 28 MB/s with 4.5% sys load and about 470 IRQs/s on the controller.

After reading some stuff about this stupid 80pin cabling and so, i don't see
real physical reasons, but the disk also counts up the CRC errors, so this
really seems to be physical in any way... controller timing or so.

> this issue, and at least one PR that I recall, but can't seem to locate
> at the moment.

I also found a lot of questions, but no answers which i could try...

> The suggestions at the time were a weak PSU (not likely), or timing or
> speed issues with the Miata's PCI chipset (sounds more likely, as I've
> not had a single error with Ultra/66 in 2 years).

Hm. Just checked my PC164 (running FreeBSD currently), has the same controller
for DVD-burner cd DVD-ROM, and i think it has some reason why i set those to
UDMA2 there also. But before initializing the RAID based on a 3ware 7506, i
think i had successfully running the controller there with exactly the same
disks (WD2000JB, i like them :), IIRC, the problem was just with the DVD drives
making trouble with higher modes. Don't want to try now, the box crashes often
enough without such experiments... will be upgraded to NetBSD soon.

...Michael

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