> 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
