Marcin Juszkiewicz - serial ata

NAS update

2020-07-07T11:53:00+02:00

In 2014 I bought Synology DS214se NAS and two 4TB hard drives. It worked fine for me for years and served files. But it was low cpu power system with just 256MB of ram so was too easy to overload.

Let’s move to x86-64

So few years ago friend was selling ASUS M5A78L-M LX3 mainboard with AMD FX-6300 processor. I bought it, added 8 GB of ram from my desktop (which got additional 16 GB instead) and put into Node 804 case from Fractal Design.

Case fits MicroATX board and has plenty of space for storage (I think 10 3.5”, 2 2.5” and slot-in optical drive).

Machine got several hard drives (from other home machines or drawers):

WD Red 4 TB x2
Toshiba 2 TB
Samsung 1.5 TB

Hard drives in cages

Hard drives cage

FreeNAS

Installed FreeNAS 11 on it and started using. Machine was named ‘lumpek’ (Lumpy the Heffalump) to follow my way of naming computers.

4 TB drives went into simple mirror, 2 TB for less important data and 1.5 TB one for virtual machines and related storage (like installation iso files).

ZFS works nice, some extra FreeNAS plugins allowed me to offload some services from my desktop to NAS (like Transmission daemon for fetching torrents or MySQL server for local needs).

Memory upgrade

Many people say that NAS machine should have ECC memory. So at some moment it got 16 GB (2x 8 GB sticks) of DDR3-1866 ECC memory recovered from old server:

Handle 0x0026, DMI type 16, 15 bytes
Physical Memory Array
        Location: System Board Or Motherboard
        Use: System Memory
        Error Correction Type: Single-bit ECC
        Maximum Capacity: 16 GB
        Error Information Handle: Not Provided
        Number Of Devices: 2

More disks

4 TB of space ends one day. So I went and bought another WD Red 4 TB disk. The idea was to move data from mirror to some spare storage, create new RAID-Z1 array from 3x 4 TB drives and migrate data back.

But… Lumpek already had 4 hard drives and it was maximum this mainboard supported.

Dell H310 aka LSI 9211-8i

Luckily mainboard has on-board graphics so PCI Express x16 slot was empty. Asked friends, checked some internet pages and ordered used Dell H310 SAS controller. This is probably the most popular (among IBM M1015) storage solution in FreeNAS community.

Card arrived with not needed SAS cable and SFF-8187 cables came in other order.

Crossflashing

How to make best use of server class RAID controller? Strip it from any RAID functionality ;D

Turns out that Dell H310 is basically LSI 9211-8i card. Which means we can flash it with generic firmware to switch to “initiator target” (also called “IT mode”). Card will then presents each drive individually to the host.

There are several pages describing process. One of them is JC-LAN. I do not remember which set of instructions I followed but they do not differ much.

At the end I got generic LSI SAS2008 controller:

root@lumpek:~ # sas2flash -listall
LSI Corporation SAS2 Flash Utility
Version 16.00.00.00 (2013.03.01) 
Copyright (c) 2008-2013 LSI Corporation. All rights reserved 

        Adapter Selected is a LSI SAS: SAS2008(B2)   

Num   Ctlr            FW Ver        NVDATA        x86-BIOS         PCI Addr
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

0  SAS2008(B2)     20.00.07.00    14.01.00.08    07.39.02.00     00:02:00:00

        Finished Processing Commands Successfully.
        Exiting SAS2Flash.
root@lumpek:~ #

And as a bonus all my hard drives got a bit more bandwidth:

da2: <ATA WDC WD40EFRX-68W 0A82> Fixed Direct Access SPC-4 SCSI device
da2: 600.000MB/s transfers
da2: Command Queueing enabled
da2: 3815447MB (7814037168 512 byte sectors)
da2: quirks=0x8<4K>

Not that 300->600 MB/s transfer update change anything with rusting plates ;D

Summary

FreeNAS based machine serves me well. Five hard drives give lot of space for data. 1 GbE network connection is probably my main limit now but there are no plans so far for moving to 10 GbE cards/switch due to their price.

Virtual machines run from NAS with good speed and if I need faster then I can move them to NVME in my desktop or laptop.

New hard drive

2012-05-23T10:31:00+02:00

During UDS-Q I bought 3TB Seagate disk in USB 3.0 enclosure. Today I finally connected it to my desktop, formatted as ext4 and mounted.

I am surprised by speed of USB 3.0 - 147MB/s according to hdparm test is more than rest of my hard drives have. If technology will increase that way my SSD may became obsolete at time when another hdd will join my setup.

What for 2.73TB drive someone may ask. I plan to use it for backup of my machines.

Never say never

2008-05-09T12:54:00+02:00

Years ago I had Gigabyte mainboard in computer at work. One day cpu fan died — it did not shut down but tried to operate with 85°C at CPU… That day I decided to not buy Gigabyte mainboards anymore (my home machine had in BIOS limit of working temperatures with 70°C set as temp to shut down).

Few days ago I upgraded my home machine. And it is Gigabyte powered :) To be exact: EP35C-DS3R is what I bought.

There are few annoyances:

Intel AHCI SATA BIOS adds few seconds on each boot for checking 6 Serial-ATA ports
Gigabyte AHCI SATA/ATA BIOS adds few more and ask for pressing key (with few seconds timeout)

But also nice stuff:

profiles in BIOS — so I am able to configure everything and store settings for later use
flashing BIOS from USB stick, hard drive or floppy (does someone still use floppies?)

I also added few other components: Core2Quad Q6600 CPU, 4GB RAM and new hard drive but that is other story.

Someone know how to re-enable Serial-ATA port?

2007-10-17T14:46:00+02:00

On my system (2.6.23-rc9) I have Serial-ATA DVD/RW drive connected to sata_sil controller:

[   96.858283] ata6: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 310)
[   97.012480] ata6.00: ATAPI: TSSTcorpCD/DVDW SH-S183A, SB02, max UDMA/33
[   97.012482] ata6.00: applying bridge limits
[   97.169126] ata6.00: configured for UDMA/33

Sometimes when there is a problem with CD or DVD disk controller shutdowns drive:

[53560.095573] cdrom: sr0: mrw address space DMA selected
[53561.001946] ISO 9660 Extensions: Microsoft Joliet Level 3
[53561.002777] ISOFS: changing to secondary root
[53621.380238] ata6.00: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x90000 action 0x2
[53621.380249] ata6.00: cmd a0/00:00:00:00:20/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0 cdb 0x0 data 0
[53621.380252]          res 51/60:03:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error)
[53621.380263] ata6: hard resetting port
[53623.783961] ata6: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 310)
[53642.595278] ata6.00: qc timeout (cmd 0xa1)
[53642.595285] ata6.00: failed to IDENTIFY (I/O error, err_mask=0x4)
[53642.595288] ata6.00: revalidation failed (errno=-5)
[53642.595292] ata6: failed to recover some devices, retrying in 5 secs
[53645.092046] ata6: hard resetting port
[53646.193870] ata6: SATA link down (SStatus 1 SControl 310)
[53646.193881] ata6.00: limiting speed to UDMA/25:PIO3
[53646.193884] ata6: failed to recover some devices, retrying in 5 secs
[53648.690501] ata6: hard resetting port
[53649.792323] ata6: SATA link down (SStatus 1 SControl 310)
[53649.792333] ata6.00: disabled
[53650.042442] ata6: EH pending after completion, repeating EH (cnt=4)
[53650.042459] ata6: EH complete
[53650.042512] sr 6:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
[53650.042518] sr 6:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
[53650.042522] sr 6:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
[53650.042536] sr 6:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
[53650.042632] ata6.00: detaching (SCSI 6:0:0:0)

I wonder is there a way to re-enable ata6.00 in other way then power down/power up whole machine because it looks like reboot is not a way to get it working again.

17” laptops are huge

2007-05-25T10:44:00+02:00

Few days ago one of my friends asked me for help on choosing laptop. The idea was “I want to buy laptop to use instead of my 7 years old desktop”. We were discussing few options and he finally found Dell Inspiron 9400 for less then 1000 EUR. It is interesting machine:

17” display with 1400x900 resolution
Core 2 Duo cpu
2GB ram
ATI X1400 gfx card
160GB Serial ATA disk

After checking who seller is we decided that I will go and buy that laptop (seller was from Poznań).

Yesterday I bought that beast and I have to say one thing — it is HUGE (bottom one on photo). I am used to my 12” D400 (top one on photo) and sometimes I use Ania’s 15.4” laptop (middle one) when I need MS Windows.

A pile of laptops

As usual it comes with MS Windows — this time it was Vista Home Premium. It was my first time with Vista — so now I can tell that I used all MS Windows versions (from 1.01 to Vista). What do I think of it? Hard to tell because I do not used it too much. Looks nice and takes some time to find things which were in XP.

Now when I used 17” laptop I know that I do not want such one — 12-15.4” are enough size for travelling. And for desktop I prefer desktop machine with big LCD then 17” laptop.

PATA -> Serial ATA time

2007-03-22T18:15:00+01:00

Today I finished storage upgrade of my box. Before I had only PATA devices. Recently I bought Serial ATA II hard drive so my config was (2.6.21-rc3 kernel with libata for all SATA/PATA devices):

ata1.00: ATA-6: ST3120026A, 3.06, max UDMA/100
ata1.00: 234441648 sectors, multi 16: LBA48
ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100
scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ATA      ST3120026A       3.06 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
SCSI device sda: 234441648 512-byte hdwr sectors (120034 MB)

scsi 1:0:0:0: CD-ROM            TOSHIBA  DVD-ROM SD-M1212 1R22 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 32x/32x cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray

scsi 1:0:1:0: CD-ROM            TEAC     CD-W516EB        1.0K PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
sr1: scsi3-mmc drive: 40x/40x writer cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray

ata5.00: ATA-7: ST3320620NS, 3.AEG, max UDMA/133
ata5.00: 625142448 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32)
ata5.00: configured for UDMA/100
scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ATA      ST3320620NS      3.AE PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
SCSI device sdb: 625142448 512-byte hdwr sectors (320073 MB)

PATA bus contain: Seagate 120GB hdd which I bought in 2003, then 9 years old Toshiba DVD drive and 6 years old Teac CD writer. Then SATA Seagate 320GB hdd which I bought one week ago and configured as LVM (some parts of 120GB will be added into it).

Today I took out old PATA optical drives and replaced them with Samsung SH-S183A DVD writer (Serial ATA). Now bus look a bit different:

 ata1.00: ATA-6: ST3120026A, 3.06, max UDMA/100
 ata1.00: 234441648 sectors, multi 16: LBA48
 ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100
 scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ATA      ST3120026A       3.06 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
 SCSI device sda: 234441648 512-byte hdwr sectors (120034 MB)

 ata5.00: ATA-7: ST3320620NS, 3.AEG, max UDMA/133
 ata5.00: 625142448 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32)
 ata5.00: configured for UDMA/100
 scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ATA      ST3320620NS      3.AE PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
 SCSI device sdb: 625142448 512-byte hdwr sectors (320073 MB)

 scsi 6:0:0:0: CD-ROM            TSSTcorp CD/DVDW SH-S183A SB02 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
 sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 94x/94x writer dvd-ram cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray

That “94x writer” looks funny as this is 18xDVD writer. And I must say that due to switch to libata in Linux there are no problems with handling Serial ATA devices (nevermind hdd or atapi ones).