[ale] Possible errors on Hard Drive

[Greg Freemyer]

Scott,

I don't know enough to interpret all those code values, but I see that
you just moved from Sata-150 to Sata-300 and amongst the output you
have:  HSM Violation.

Sata-150 (Sata 1) does not support NCQ.

Sata-300 (Sata 2) does and is enabled by default for Linux.

Unfortunately all of the stable Linux kernels have bugs in the NCQ
implementation and report HSM violations under normal conditions if
NCQ is in use.

You can disable NCQ (how?) or you can ignore the errors.

The latest 2.6.24-rc5 (iirc) has eliminated the HSM violation noise,
but I don't know how stable it is yet.  They put in a lot of ACPI
power saving stuff in 2.6.24.  I'm not so sure its going to be a good
kernel.  Not sure if only laptops are affected by ACPI, or everything.

2.6.22 and 2.6.23 are supposed to get updates to the stable versions
to eliminate the HSM violation noise.  You may be better off waiting
for one of those to get the cleanup patch.

Hope that helps.

Greg

On Dec 21, 2007 9:30 PM, Scott Castaline <hscast at charter.net> wrote:
> Checking my logs and noticed that I'm suddenly getting what looks like
> drive errors but not sure. I've noticed the following repeated about 3
> times every once in a while:
> ata4.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2
> ata4.00: port_status 0x20080000
> ata4.00: cmd c8/00:30:ef:e8:cb/00:00:00:00:00/e6 tag 0 cdb 0x0 data 24576 in
>          res 50/00:00:1e:e9:cb/00:00:00:00:00/e6 Emask 0x2 (HSM violation)
> ata4: soft resetting port
> ata4: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
> ata4.00: configured for UDMA/133
> ata4: EH complete
>
> followed by:
> sd 3:0:0:0: [sdd] 976773168 512-byte hardware sectors (500108 MB)
> sd 3:0:0:0: [sdd] Write Protect is off
> sd 3:0:0:0: [sdd] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't
> support DPO or FUA
>
> I just recently changed HA from an Adaptec 2 port SATA 150 to a Promise
> SATA 300TX4, 4 port SATA 300. I have all WD drives.
> port 1 = WD1600  (150)
> port 2 = WD5000  (300)
> port 3 = WD360    (150)  Raptor 10K rpm
> port 4 = WD360    (150)  Raptor 10K rpm
>
> Any ideas? Everything I've found is close, but no cigar. Also any
> documentation I've found is like from 2004. I'm not too sure how current
> that is.
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> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>



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Greg Freemyer
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