[PLUG] SATA II, mdadm and soft power off

[drew wymore]

On 5/12/07, John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 12 May 2007 13:04:08 -0700
> "Larry Brigman" <larry.brigman at gmail.com> dijo:
>
> > > I thought of that, but I'm not sure if the PS units they have would
> > > have the proper connectors for this motherboard, plus it needs 12
> volts
> > > separately for the CPU with a funny four-pin square connector I've
> > > never seen before.
> > >
> > > As for the disk operation, I'm currently running mhdd from the
> Ultimate
> > > Boot CD. No errors so far, but we'll see how it goes. I think Galen is
> > > right and I need to run something that tests both disks at the same
> > > time to see if the problem is in mdadm or in the controller. So far it
> > > appears that there is no problem with the power running either disk by
> > > itself.
>
> > Is the power for the drives thru the motherboard or direct from the PSU?
>
> Directly from the PSU. And since the new Antec PSU has two 12 volt
> rails it has two SATA power connectors, each with two plugs on it. I
> connected each drive to a different one, presuming that this means each
> one is on a different rail.
>
> As for mhdd, it finished. The first disk ran nicely until it got to
> around 80% with 99.99% of the blocks <3ms, then  suddenly the number of
> blocks that were >3 and <10ms increased dramatically. At the end there
> were three blocks that were >10 and <50ms. The average speed was about
> 80,000 kb/s. The second drive also did fine until about 80%, then the
> number of slower blocks started increasing dramatically. At the end it
> had 759 >10ms and <50ms, and the average speed was only 64,800 kb/s.
> However, mhdd did not announce any errors as such. That is, it may have
> been slower on one drive than the other, but evidently it finally read
> all the blocks correctly.
>
> When it finished the second drive I decided to do a scan with the remap
> switch on, starting with the second, slow drive. When it finished it
> gave me more or less the same results as when I ran it without the remap
> switch. I've scoured the scant documentation and forum for mhdd, but I
> can't find anything that tells me how slow a block has to be before
> mhdd will remap it, or if there is a way to change the threshhold.
> Evidently 50 ms doesn't trigger a remap.
>
> What bothers me about these results is that the second drive is quite a
> bit slower than the first one. And timing was one of the things iozone
> was bitching about.
>
> Quoting Dale:
> >I'll have to agree
> > with Galen here, I think it's time to look for a new motherboard
> > -- one without nVidia chipsets.  (Not to be confused with their
> > graphics chips!)  It's possible you could have gotten two bad
> > power supplies in a row (hey, it's happened to me), but it's
> > really unlikely.



This won't help you but Abit is evil .. I bought 1 of their mobo's and had
so many problems with it I gave up forever on them. I buy almost exclusively
MSI now and have never had a single problem with any of their gear, I've
also had good luck with Asus stuff too, except for a video card that started
showing artifacts after 2 days.

Drew-