Re: sun blade 100 hard disk

[Admar Schoonen <admar@luon.net>]

On Fri, Jun 17, 2005 at 12:36:49PM +0200, Olivier BERT wrote:
> I'm sorry to post many messages but I have have another problem.
> It concerns IDE devices. My Debian is installed now but when copy large 
> files for example or when I make several disk operations at the same time, 
> errors appears in my file system. For example, some null characters appear 
> in some files.
> I am about to think that it is a DMA problem. But my knowledge concerning 
> hardware is a bit limited.
> 
> - Is it an hardware problem ?
> - may be a problem of connections between the disk and the IDE bus on the 
> moter board ?
> 
> - is it a software or hardware problem ?

I don't know. I never noticed any problems with my 20 GB and 120 GB drives (both
seagate fwiw) in my blade 100; not with Solaris 8 neither with Linux 2.6.x
(using ufs in Solaris and ext3 in Linux). I never did any tricks with hdparm to
set the DMA level or something.

Things that come to mind:
- do you use a proper cable? I'm not sure if it's an ATA66 or ATA100 controller
  in the blade 100, so I use an ATA100 cable to connect the 120 GB drive (20 GB
  still uses the default cable that came with the box). I'm not sure if ATA66
  and ATA100 cables differ, but for at least ATA100 it is required that every
  signal wire has it's own ground wire iirc (thus, a 40 pin cable has actually
  80 wires).
- what filesystem do you use? I've read somewhere that there could be problems
  with Reiserfs on sparc, though I don't know any details.

Admar