[plug] Dismal SATA performance...

[Arie Hol]

On 12 Jul 2005 at 11:10, Jon  Miller wrote:

> Andrew,
> Can't offer any help on your situation but I too experienced the same thing.  However, since I've
> been using Seagate Barracuda 80GB NCQ drives it has made a difference.
> 
> Jon
> 
> >>> andrew.furey at gmail.com 6:55:37 pm 5/07/2005 >>>
> 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.
> 

8<---------------- snip -------------------->8


My knowledge on SATA drives is not up to date.

I'm not 100% sure on this - but could it have something to do with the caching on the HDD 
( 8Mb or more  ? )

If you are using the drive with 'writeback' caching enabled - would changing the caching to 'write 
through' - make any difference??

Regards Arie
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