Re: hard disk I/O error fixed only by hdparm -W0 - any clues?

[VJ <vijay s gill gmail com>]

> Is it a SATA drive?  And is your motherboard's controller a Silicon Image
> one (uses "sata_sil" driver under Linux)?   If so, I've seen that
> problem too on some of our systems, and read about it elsewhere --
> not sure where to point the finger, but it seems that
> the Seagate SATA drives don't implement the protocol the way that the
> Silicon Image controllers want, so you get spurious I/O errors.
> (That is, they're real as seen from the Linux point of view, but don't
> indicate bad spots on the disk, or failure of the drive electronics, etc.)
>
> Haven't heard where the incompatibility lies, but "hdparm -W0" disables
> write caching on the drive -- I bet that reduces performance a good deal,
> so not the most desirable way to work around the problem.
>
> Better workaround: other manufacturers' drives work fine, so you
> might be able (... might have been able?) to return your Seagate
> drive and get a similar one, e.g. from Western Digital.   That's
> what we did.  I couldn't even *install* FC2 on our si-image-equipped
> systems with a Seagate drive, nor with its replacement -- the installer
> would detect an I/O error after copying a few tens of MB, and the
> driver would lock up.  But WD drives have worked flawlessly.
> And dozens of Seagate drives are working well for us on other
> SATA controllers.
>

Hi, thanks for the reply. Mine is a PATA one. I still remember digging
up some information on kernel not being able to handle large cache
(that is where I read to use -W0 to disable caching). I could not find
it now (may be I did try enough).

I cannot return my drive now as it has been in my system for a long
time. I remember kernel showing this error long time ago (a year ago)
and I started using -W0. Yesterday it just occured to me to see if
things have changed or not.

Any way, it was nice to see responses to my query.

Regards from
VJ