From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Wed May 12 23:21:31 2010 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id ACFC61065677 for ; Wed, 12 May 2010 23:21:31 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from ahamiltonwright@mta.ca) Received: from smtpx.mta.ca (smtpx.mta.ca [138.73.1.138]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7998D8FC08 for ; Wed, 12 May 2010 23:21:31 +0000 (UTC) Received: from [138.73.29.51] (port=49161 helo=qemg.org) by smtpx.mta.ca with esmtpsa (TLSv1:AES256-SHA:256) (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1OCLF1-0002dh-Ax; Wed, 12 May 2010 20:21:27 -0300 Date: Wed, 12 May 2010 20:21:27 -0300 (ADT) From: "A. Wright" To: Adam Vande More In-Reply-To: Message-ID: References: <201005121456.o4CEurEZ078671@lava.sentex.ca> <201005122049.o4CKn7kS080566@lava.sentex.ca> User-Agent: Alpine 2.00 (BSF 1167 2008-08-23) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Sender: ahamiltonwright@mta.ca Cc: FreeBSD - , Mike Tancsa Subject: Re: Long I/O pauses on same mass storage X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 12 May 2010 23:21:31 -0000 On Wed, 12 May 2010, Adam Vande More wrote: > On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 3:49 PM, Mike Tancsa > wrote: > At 04:27 PM 5/12/2010, A. Wright wrote: > === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === > Device Model: WDC WD15EARS-00S8B1 > Serial Number: WD-WCAVY2700359 > > Isnt that one of those Western Digital Green drives ? I seem > to recall a number of people complaining about similar issues > where the drive stalls. Perhaps a firmware update ? Or perhaps a > way to disable the power saving/spin down features ? Is your > controller set to AHCI, or regular SATA. what does > /var/run/dmesg.boot show ? This is indeed one of the so-called "eco" drives. The controller is set to SATA (no mention of ahci, though I will now look at it as suggested earlier to see if I can control the problem that way). > In addition to what I pointed out earlier, I believe that is > also a 4k sector drive. You'll need to align your partitions > accordingly. As far as I can tell, it is a standard 512 byte sector. The general lack of documentation with this drive (shipped in a plastic "coffin" -- the only docs supplied with it were the label itself), but on the WD site, they indicate: Formatted Capacity 1500301 MB Used Sectors Per Drive 2930277168 Assuming a "megabyte" is 10^6 bytes, as is standard with storage vendors (1500301 * 1000 * 1000) / 2930277168 = 511.99968 So it appears that at least I don't have *that* particular problem. Thanks for the suggestions; I had not looked at AHCI before, and it may well be part of my ticket out of this problem. A.