First SATA drive - not working

[Giles Orr]

On 10/1/07, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 01, 2007 at 10:06:51AM -0400, Giles Orr wrote:
> > Debian testing, kernel 2.6.21-2-k7.  It's auto-loading the sata_via
> > kernel module.
[SNIP]
> > This is really making me think that I should buy a SATA PCI card ...
> > That would allow me to use SATA drives in any of my other computers,
> > so it might solve not only the current problem but potentially some
> > future ones as well.  Does that make sense?
>
> It does make some sense if the onboard controller is really that much of
> a pain.
>
> What model is the drive again?

The hard drive is a Western Digital 500 Gb.  WD5000AAKS, WD Caviar SE16.

I bought a Bytecc Serial ATA PCI card yesterday on College, with one
internal and one external connector for $20.  I chose it because it
said "Silicon Image Sil3112a" right on the box, and that's a supported
chip.  And it worked, first try - the "sata_sil" kernel module was
autoloaded.

But the problems continue.  When copying my backup from an external
USB hard drive to this new SATA drive, I occasionally get the
following error:

  EXT3-fs error (device sda6): ext3_new_block: Allocating
  block in system zone - blocks from 42500102, length 1.

Not surprisingly, this completely munges the file system (which is
indeed ext3).  fsck spits millions of errors.  So I reformatted the
HD, I did two complete rounds of read/write bad blocks checking.  The
disk seems to be fine.  But big copies still cause it to spit this
same error.  Google suggests that this isn't a particularly common
error, but it seems to be associated with Silicon Image SATA
controllers.  Worse, I found this post:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/3/12/65 - same error, two years ago.
Apparently it hasn't been dealt with, or at least not completely.

I am at this point seriously considering buying a 500 Gb IDE drive,
maybe use the SATA in an external case.  Except with my current
success rate, there will be problems with the IDE too.

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
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