Big drive support

Does anyone on this list have actual experience with ATA-6 drives over 128
gigabyte (binary) 137 gigabyte (decimal) in ide-to-1394 drive adapters?

We have several Granite Digital drive bays and trays, with WDC 200 and
Maxline II (300 gbyte) drives. For several months I was fairly confident
that they were working fine, but now I am not so sure.

For testing, I did a default minimal install of RH9 from the store-bought
CD, ran sfdisk to make a single partition on the 300 gigabyte drive in the
GD drive bay, and mkfs.ext3 to make a filesystem. Then I copied /usr (less
than a gig) onto the drive. This ran rapidly and without error messages. A
cursory examination suggested that the copy was accurate, but when I ran
e2fsck many errors were found.

For a second trial, I ran RH up2date and repartitioned, formated, etc. At
the last step e2fsck again found many errors.

For a third trial, I did a default install of Suse 8.2, repartitioned etc.
Again many errors.

Lastly, ran SUSE update, but still no improvement.
 
Red Hat uses ohci 1.1 and SBP2 rev 709. The updated Suse installation uses
version SBP2 version 799).

With the RH9 up2date'd system I also tested other drives mounted in other
GD trays, and swapped drive bays and cables also. The one constant seemed
to be that the 10 and 20 gig drives worked, but the 200 and 300 gig drives
did not.

Granite Digital does not claim any Linux compatibility, but does
aggressively claim to support ATA-6, and drives over 137 gigabytes.

Another vendor is claiming Linux compatibility (www.cooldrives.com) but
they only mention Linux with their Oxford 922 based products - not their
911 based product. Is that a clue that the GD 911 based product is
unlikely to work?

The e2fsck error messages included:

  duplicate bad blocks
  bad inode number for ... in inode
  bad node ref count

etc. Hundreds of messages on some passes.

I can provide a frame, tray and drive (gratis) to the maintainer if that
would help.

Daniel Feenberg
feenberg isat nber dotte org

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Received on Sat Oct 18 02:57:45 2003