Subject: Re: superdisks
To: Peter Seebach <seebs@herd.plethora.net>
From: Eric Haszlakiewicz <haszlaki@UAccess.NET>
List: current-users
Date: 01/23/1998 04:05:03
> >	One thing I have noticed is that if anything tries to access the
> >drive too soon after you put in a 120Meg disk it looses an interrupt
> >and then it doesn't work at all.
> None, but thanks for the tip!  How long are you having to wait after
> inserting the disk?  I noticed that it seemed to choke on the disk
> if it was in during the boot...  In fact, mine always seems to choke on
> the LS-120 disks, but on the other hand, for all I know, mine's bad.

	It appears to work fine if I wait for the drive to stop spinning
after I put the disk in.  I guess it's probably trying to figure out
what type of disk it's reading.  
	As for booting: is the drive still spinning when netbsd probes it?
Mine takes long enough to figure out what kind of disk it has that netbsd
gets to it first.
	
> >	Other than that, works kinda ok.
> >( raw read/write:>300K/s, 20K/s, hmm...slow writing, wonder why )
	wow, something is really screwey with this drive.  Writing to
the raw device or to the whole disk partition goes really slow.  I've
tried several block sizes, still 5-20K/s.  BUT: if I newfs it and
write stuff through the filesystem it gets ~200K/s.  
	uh... why?  hmm..

> Huh.  Mine gets weird controller timeouts...
	I just started geting some 'unit attention' errors (drive saying
it's got no disk? are the meanings of these documented anywhere convinient?)
after a lost interrupt. Wow, now it seems to work even right after the
disk is put in.  Although I noticed that the "lost interrupt" err message
has a c_bcount = 12 instead 0.  (what is c_bcount?)  Rather it spits back an
error but _then_, once the drive is ready, it works.
	Another wonderful side effect, while netbsd tries to talk to
the drive it completely hangs.  (i.e. no ping response, no response at all)
(I assume maybe in sdstart, b/c it's called at splbio()?)

	What kind of controller timeouts is your drive getting?  What
kind of drive do you have (a dr-tech one?, not that it matters probably, they
look like they're all the same hardware, sold by different people)

eric
haszlaki@uiuc.edu