[mythtv-users] Using HDParm to Spindown Hard Drives

[Scott Kidder]

On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 3:12 PM, Scott Kidder <kidder.scott at gmail.com> wrote:

> The Backend log goes back nearly 4 months with no occurrences of IOBOUND
> errors until I configured the drives to sleep using 'hdparm' yesterday.
> Also, the IOBOUND errors occur only in the first few seconds of recording.
> Do these messages indicate that the recording will be corrupted, or are they
> just a warning that the IO is not responding quickly?
>

For what it's worth, I had been using the default PCI latency timer value
for the Promise SATA TX4 controller that has the two standby-enabled
hard-drives.  The latency reported by 'lspci -v' was 72, only slightly
better than the value 64 used by my two capture cards:

02:0b.0 Mass storage controller: Promise Technology, Inc. PDC40718 (SATA 300
TX4) (rev 02)
        Subsystem: Promise Technology, Inc. PDC40718 (SATA 300 TX4)
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 72, IRQ 23
        I/O ports at dc00 [size=128]
        I/O ports at d400 [size=256]
        Memory at efefb000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
        Memory at efec0000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=128K]
        Expansion ROM at cdc00000 [disabled] [size=32K]
        Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 2
        Kernel driver in use: sata_promise
        Kernel modules: sata_promise

I increased the latency timer to 64 in my /etc/rc.d/rc.local:

/sbin/setpci -v -s 02:0b.0 latency_timer=64

Running 'lspci -v' gives the following output for the SATA controller:

02:0b.0 Mass storage controller: Promise Technology, Inc. PDC40718 (SATA 300
TX4) (rev 02)
        Subsystem: Promise Technology, Inc. PDC40718 (SATA 300 TX4)
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 96, IRQ 23
        I/O ports at dc00 [size=128]
        I/O ports at d400 [size=256]
        Memory at efefb000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
        Memory at efec0000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=128K]
        Expansion ROM at cdc00000 [disabled] [size=32K]
        Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 2
        Kernel driver in use: sata_promise
        Kernel modules: sata_promise

I'll run with this for a while and see how it goes.

--
Scott Kidder
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