External eSATA drive downgraded to 1.5Gbs

[Robin Laing]

Konstantin Svist wrote:
> On 10/26/2009 11:32 AM, Kam Leo wrote:
>> On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 5:12 AM, Andy Campbell
> [snip]
>>> [trantor] ~ $dmesg | grep ata7
>>>

> 
> My drives are internal SATA & I have multiple nodes all showing this 
> message:
> 
> Oct 25 04:30:57 rele406 kernel: ata5.01: qc timeout (cmd 0xa0)
> Oct 25 04:30:57 rele406 kernel: ata5.01: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 
> SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
> Oct 25 04:30:57 rele406 kernel: ata5.01: cmd 
> a0/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/b0 tag 0
> Oct 25 04:30:57 rele406 kernel:         cdb 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 
> 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
> Oct 25 04:30:57 rele406 kernel:         res 
> 51/20:03:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/b0 Emask 0x5 (timeout)
> Oct 25 04:30:57 rele406 kernel: ata5.01: status: { DRDY ERR }
> Oct 25 04:31:02 rele406 kernel: ata5: link is slow to respond, please be 
> patient (ready=0)
> Oct 25 04:31:07 rele406 kernel: ata5: device not ready (errno=-16), 
> forcing hardreset
> Oct 25 04:31:07 rele406 kernel: ata5: soft resetting link
> Oct 25 04:31:07 rele406 kernel: ata5.01: configured for UDMA/33
> Oct 25 04:31:07 rele406 kernel: ata5: EH complete
> 
> 
> Not quite the same thing, of course.. but hoping you can tell me 
> something about it.
> All drives & motheboards are same model. All are showing this error 
> message at seemingly random intervals.
> 

I would have to find a copy of my old logs but I seem to remember this 
issue on my old computer and the newer drives with the controller.  I 
bounced my head around this for ages.

I found an updated firmware driver for the controller, not official, 
that improved the operation but didn't fix the error messages.  I then 
got a PCI SATA card that fixed the problem.  My motherboard died a few 
weeks later from capacitor rot.

I would check for a new firmware for the controller and see if that 
fixes the problem.  Note, my ASUS bios didn't update the firmware as it 
was separate from the BIOS.

I did a quick search on the JMicron JMB361 and noticed that there were 
many people having issues when this chip first came out.  Some of the 
problems seem to depended on the motherboard.

--
Robin Laing