Re: device timeouts on hard disks no matter what..

[Teemu Rinta-aho <teemu%rinta-aho.org@localhost>]

On Dec 10, 2009, at 5:38 PM, Manuel Bouyer wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 09, 2009 at 08:20:45AM +0000, David Laight wrote:
>> On Tue, Dec 08, 2009 at 09:38:32PM +0000, Michael van Elst wrote:
>>> 
>>> Sounds more like a driver bug if this is an LBA24 read. The range
>>> spans the LBA24 boundary and at least according to my ATA documents
>>> that is not permitted.
>> 
>> Which is what the driver does - and where this thread started!
> 
> No, this thread started about drive timeouts, not drives errors.

That's right.

I have now found out that I can reproduce those read timeouts when
raidframe is running a parity check on the raid set. The read
timeouts hit random sectors, so I don't think the drives are broken,
or then all drives that they sell nowadays are broken.

One thing I tried was to run kernel with only one CPU, but it didn't
change anything. I thought it would make a difference, as the problems
started when I went multi-core.

I guess the next step is to move the disks to yet another PC with
a bigger power supply.

But, could you please shortly describe, what does it actually mean
when there is a read/write timeout, that is "soft corrected"?
Who timeouts, where is the timer, and who has set that timer?

Teemu