Hi all, I have a new server based on the MSI K8T Master2 mobo with dual Opterons. I have three disks: one PATA (added that for installation purposes) and two SATA drives. It is running quite alright, but I have some questionmarks around my disks. I thought I knew a lot about Linux but this really puzzles me. I am running SuSE kernels (downloaded from kraxel) and I have just now upgraded to 2.6.1-5. Now the questions: My PATA disk becomes hde and the SATA disks become hda and hdc (if SATA is enabled, otherwise PATA disk is hda). Is this normal? Other people seem to see their PATA disks on hda-hdd and SATA on hde-hdh. Here are some excerpts from dmesg: ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx VIA8237SATA: IDE controller at PCI slot 0000:00:0f.0 VIA8237SATA: chipset revision 128 VIA8237SATA: 100% native mode on irq 20 ide0: BM-DMA at 0xd000-0xd007, BIOS settings: hda:pio, hdb:pio ide1: BM-DMA at 0xd008-0xd00f, BIOS settings: hdc:pio, hdd:pio hda: WDC WD1200JD-00FYB0, ATA DISK drive Using anticipatory io scheduler ide0 at 0xc000-0xc007,0xc402 on irq 20 hdc: WDC WD1200JD-00FYB0, ATA DISK drive ide1 at 0xc800-0xc807,0xcc02 on irq 20 VP_IDE: IDE controller at PCI slot 0000:00:0f.1 VP_IDE: chipset revision 6 VP_IDE: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later VP_IDE: VIA vt8237 (rev 00) IDE UDMA133 controller on pci0000:00:0f.1 ide2: BM-DMA at 0xd800-0xd807, BIOS settings: hde:DMA, hdf:DMA ide3: BM-DMA at 0xd808-0xd80f, BIOS settings: hdg:pio, hdh:pio hde: ExcelStor Technology J680, ATA DISK drive hdf: _NEC DVD_RW ND-1300A, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive ide2 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14 What is the deal with the double drive devices (hda/hdb for first SATA, hdc/hdd for second, hde/hdf for PATA and hdg/hdh for DVD)? Is that normal? I don't seem to get the libata stuff loaded - otherwise I guess I would have the disks on sda and sdb, right? Can I somehow choose to use this driver instead? Do I want to run this driver instead? I have seen people talking about setting the noprobe option on the hd devices and thereby getting the libata driver going - I have not been able to do this. What about performance? What should be expected from SATA disks? I had really lousy performance on 2.6.1-2 compared to the PATA disk, but the 2.6.1-5 made the situation better although SATA disks are still slower than the PATA disk - at least according to hdparm: /dev/hda: Timing buffered disk reads: 150 MB in 3.00 seconds = 49.99 MB/sec /dev/hdc: Timing buffered disk reads: 150 MB in 3.01 seconds = 49.89 MB/sec /dev/hde: Timing buffered disk reads: 174 MB in 3.02 seconds = 57.57 MB/sec On 2.6.1-2 I head about 30-32 MB/sec on the drives. Finally, I thought I had got rid of the problem by upgrading, but I just noticed that it is still there. At least one of the SATA drives (hda) is sometimes reporting this: hda: dma_timer_expiry: dma status == 0x24 hda: DMA interrupt recovery hda: lost interrupt which basically causes the drive to "hang" for 10 seconds or so, causing 100% IO-wait and then resumes activity. No corruption seen (yet). I see people on the internet talking about disabling dma, but that doesn't seem like a very good idea? As you can see there are a lot of questions...basically I feel that the SATA disks are not delivering what I had expected and I would really like to get any hints on what could be the problem. Linux? VIA VT8237? The disks? BIOS settings? Because the reasons I built this server was to run some intense database stuff and if PATA disks are better than SATA, then I'll just throw these suckers out and be done with it - but I really thought they were supposed to give me a little more? thanks for listening. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it! http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/