First SATA drive - not working

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Oct 03, 2007 at 07:16:03PM -0400, Giles Orr wrote:
> 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.

Well I have certainly run a lot of WD SATA drives from a Sil3112a.  I
haven't used that particular model.  I have used the WD5000AAKS with
both intel sata controllers and promise sata controllers without
problems, as well as using a USB enclosure for that drive.  I have also
used the WD3200KS with the Sil3112a with no problems.

> 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.

That really sound odd.  That sounds more like a kernel bug than a disk
error.

> 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.

Well the Sil3112a is known to not like many seagate sata drives
(supposedly seagate did something wrong in their early sata firmware).

Now since the Sil3112a is a SATA 1 controller, you could try jumpering
the drive back to SATA 1 speeds and disable all SATA 2 features.  See
diagram here:
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1409&p_created=1138290141#jumper

It is the jumper setting for OPT1.

The spread spectrum setting might also be worth looking at.  I always
avoid spread spectrum whenever possible since it does really annoying
things to clock frequencies which can screw up some things.

--
Len Sorensen
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