[plug] Dismal SATA performance...

[Andrew Furey]

Hi all,

I've just bought a Silicon Image SiI-3112 SATA controller and a pair
of Western Digital 120G drives. I'm using the libata sata_sil driver
on a self-compiled (vanilla) 2.4.30 (using them in SATA mode, and
doing RAID with the md driver).

They seem to be stable enough, but while transferring my existing
system to them I've noticed that at times they're abysmally slow
(apparently during writes). Often it will be fine for several dozen
Mb, then it will essentially stop for 20 seconds or more. The system
(console VTs) is responsive enough, although anything disk related
pauses in that time, before suddenly picking up again with no errors
logged.

Googling around, I've seen references to problems with a whole bunch
of Seagate drives with this controller, but nothing regarding WD. I'd
rather not upgrade to 2.6 if I don't have to, but it'll certainly be
annoying in the long run as it stands...

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Andrew

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