# Abit AB9 pro, ICH8 and crappy disk performance

## neonman

I've got some big performance related problem with my Abit AB9 pro mobo, the ICH8 controller and my SATA disks.. I've got 2 64GB WD raptor disks in a raid0, and I used to get around 130-140mb/sec seq write with them, but now with my new mobo I'm lucky if I get 10mb/sec, also, during heavy disk activity the system locks up, until the write is complete (Ie, no other read or write is being made, it's like heavy IO completely starves all other processes until it's finished)..

Running 2.6.19-rc5-mm2 atm, but I've tried a few diffrent kernels, same thing.

Also, it doesn't matter if I enable AHCI in the BIOS (But with AHCI enabled the disks spin down/power down when I boot, just to power up again a few seconds after. The boot progress freezes until the disks have spun up again. (This happens when the kernel probes the sata controller ports at bootup, the disks spin down at the same time, but spin up one by one as they're getting probed))

I've tried changing I/O scheduler etc, nothing works.

Example of what I mean with crappy performance:

dd if=/dev/zero of=test232 bs=1M count=100; time sync

100+0 records in

100+0 records out

104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 0.130424 s, 804 MB/s

real    0m21.104s

user    0m0.000s

sys     0m0.011s

21 seconds to do a seq write of 100mb.. And during this time ALL other disk IO gets starved, I can't do anything that uses disk IO for the duration..

Yet, a hdparm shows a decent read 

hdparm -tT /dev/md4

/dev/md4:

 Timing cached reads:   8060 MB in  1.99 seconds = 4042.19 MB/sec

 Timing buffered disk reads:  400 MB in  3.00 seconds = 133.28 MB/sec

dd if=zero1 of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1000

1000+0 records in

1000+0 records out

1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 11.4335 s, 91.7 MB/s

This is the cpu usage stats I get from top when running the dd write:

Cpu0  :  0.0%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.0%id, 99.0%wa,  0.5%hi,  0.5%si,  0.0%st

Cpu1  :  0.0%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni,100.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st

Pretty crappy read speeds compared to what I got on my previous mobo (around 140mb/sec), but still alot better than the 4mb/sec I get when writing..

I've also googled this for many hours, I've searched the lkml, checked these gentoo forums, as well as other distro forums, I just don't know what else to do. I would appreciate any help or hints you could give me.

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## teapot

hello

I have the Abit AB9 board. 

I had some issues with my SATA-drive which were similar to yours. 

I experienced the same lockups you described. Audio skipped when I 

was doing something heavy. It had to do with DMA mode I think.

hdparm results were mediocre , ~25 mb/s. 

I never solved the problem really. The drive broke down 

and diagnostics showed lots of damaged sectors , so I returned the

drive to get a new one. 

I am currently running on an old Pata-drive , and I noticed a slight performance

increase compared to the SATA-drive.

A new drive shouldn't behave like that , so I direct some suspicion to the

SATA-driver. I wouldn't count on it on a stable system, so be careful.

Both of your drives and your data.

I think there's something wrong with the SATA driver and I will not use SATA until

a stable kernel with support for the controller is released.

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## teapot

check out xanas3712 reply in this thread: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-517390.html

maybe that will help...

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## neonman

Thanks for you replies.

I've already read that thread, no help there, I've already got the correct drivers etc :/

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## neonman

Gah, I've been searching for an answer to this problem for over 5 straight hours now.. Going crazy over here

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## teapot

running 32 or 64-bit Linux?

that could be the problem...

has the Pro board real RAID support by the way ?

The non-pro board said that it had raid , but thats only between 

one internal and one external drive  :Sad: 

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## neonman

32 bit, and ofc I'm using Linux SW raid instead of some fake HW (also called BIOS) raid

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## neonman

Seems like I'm on my own. :/

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## neonman

I just noticed something strange.. If I change the I/O scheduler to noop (from CFQ) I get alot better write performance (Still extremly crappy, but anyways.. pretty strange), it goes up from about 4mb/sec to around 20-30mb/sec..

This thing is wierd.. Ohwell, guess I'll just have to continue my googling, still hoping for some help from these forums, but it isn't looking that good for me :P

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## teapot

I think it is the driver that is faulty.

But you should try to isolate the problem.

Does it work better with only one SATA-drive ?

Does the raid work in windows (if you have it).

Try abits online forums.

Try to contact the kernel developer that maintains the driver.

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## neonman

I've already done that, still nothing. Not even an answer on the linux-ide ML.

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## neonman

I started getting some of this in dmesg yesterday:

ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen

ata1.00: (BMDMA stat 0x20)

ata1.00: tag 0 cmd 0xca Emask 0x4 stat 0x40 err 0x0 (timeout)

ata1: port is slow to respond, please be patient

ata1: port failed to respond (30 secs)

ata1: soft resetting port

ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0xFA07

ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0xFA07

ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0xFA07

ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0xFA07

ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0xFA07

ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0xFA07

ata1.00: qc timeout (cmd 0xec)

ata1.00: failed to IDENTIFY (I/O error, err_mask=0x4)

ata1.00: revalidation failed (errno=-5)

ata1: failed to recover some devices, retrying in 5 secs

ata1: soft resetting port

ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100

ata1: EH complete

SCSI device sda: 145226112 512-byte hdwr sectors (74356 MB)

sda: Write Protect is off

sda: Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00

SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back

ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen

ata1.00: (BMDMA stat 0x21)

ata1.00: tag 0 cmd 0xc8 Emask 0x4 stat 0x40 err 0x0 (timeout)

ata1: port is slow to respond, please be patient

ata1: port failed to respond (30 secs)

ata1: soft resetting port

ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100

ata1: EH complete

SCSI device sda: 145226112 512-byte hdwr sectors (74356 MB)

sda: Write Protect is off

sda: Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00

SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back

ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen

ata1.00: (BMDMA stat 0x21)

ata1.00: tag 0 cmd 0xc8 Emask 0x4 stat 0x40 err 0x0 (timeout)

ata1: port is slow to respond, please be patient

ata1: port failed to respond (30 secs)

ata1: soft resetting port

ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0xFA07

ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0xFA07

ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0xFA07

ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0xFA07

ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0xFA07

ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0xFA07

ata1.00: failed to IDENTIFY (I/O error, err_mask=0x2)

ata1.00: revalidation failed (errno=-5)

ata1: failed to recover some devices, retrying in 5 secs

ata1: soft resetting port

ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100

ata1: EH complete

SCSI device sda: 145226112 512-byte hdwr sectors (74356 MB)

sda: Write Protect is off

sda: Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00

SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back

I then shut down my comp, removed my cdrom, floppydrive and my 2 other disks that also were connected to the ICH8 controller. I then rebooted into init 1 and did a full fsck.reiser4 on all partitions. Now the write speeds are all normal again.. Later today I'm gonna try to plug in my 2 other disks and see what happens, and if that works, plug in the cdrom/floppy and see when stuff breaks :P

Seems like it's either a driver/kernel or hardware problem. And I really doubt that it's a HW problem.

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## neonman

I still get the sata HD lockups now and again.. Not as often as before, but still.. under heavy load the system freezes.

God damnit i'm tierd of this crap. Unusable $1000 HW upgrades. WOHO!

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## teapot

try to find something else than mm-sources. 

I would try

vanilla-sources-2.6.19_rc5

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## neonman

Still having problems. Bumping this post and hoping that someone can help.

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## st0ne

same problem here at https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-479350.html

 *st0ne wrote:*   

> hi,
> 
> same problem on my core2duo system with sata harddrives...
> 
> sometimes, the whole system hangs... HDD-Led is lighting everytime, and all is freezing completly...  
> ...

 

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## teapot

hello neonman!

I've found another thing you should try.

The Abit Ab9 Pro has 9 sata connections. 8 internal and 1 external.

The ICH8 controller controls 6 of the internal connectors.  (labeled SATA1-6 and are located at the lower right on the mobo)

There is also a Jmicron controller that controls 2 SATA-ports and 2 PATA ports. ( the SATA ports are located right above the IDE1 connector )

I recieved my new SATA harddrive today , and I had problems with getting dma and 32-bit transfer to work with the drive connected to SATA1. 

This thread https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-498160-postdays-0-postorder-asc-highlight-ich8-start-50.html suggested me to try the functionality of the

Jmicron controller. Please ignore my stupid reply in the thread   :Embarassed: 

I connected the drive to SATA8 , rebooted and now everything works without speedlimits. The drive was renamed from sda to hdg though...

I'm not into RAID stuff , but the manual says that the Jmicron SATA controller supports RAID 0-1. 

In the mentioned thread above there is information on how to configure the kernel. 

Good Luck!

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