March 9, 201313 yr Hey all, I was adding some new drives to my server tonight and when I pulled the preclear list and notice one of my drives was listed as hdX instead of sdX. From what I've seen in the config guide and preclear thread that tells me the drive is running in IDE mode. Is this something I could change in BIOS after preclearing? Will running a SATA in IDE mode even cause any problems on a NAS like this?
March 9, 201313 yr Hey all, I was adding some new drives to my server tonight and when I pulled the preclear list and notice one of my drives was listed as hdX instead of sdX. From what I've seen in the config guide and preclear thread that tells me the drive is running in IDE mode. Is this something I could change in BIOS after preclearing? Will running a SATA in IDE mode even cause any problems on a NAS like this? Yes you can change it after preclearing is complete, otherwise it will make disk access go slower than otherwise possible if you leave it in emulated IDE mode.
March 9, 201313 yr Author So, I've been reading up and it seems like the usual cause of a drive running in IDE emulation mode is AHCI not being enabled. However, I have only one drive showing up as hdX and it is running SLOW through preclear... While I have 5 other drives running normally (sdX) w/ a normal speed preclear... I can't swear to it but I'm really pretty sure I disabled IDE in BIOS before I even booted unraid, will have to go back and check... Is there any other culprit that would cause a single drive to run in IDE mode and none of the others?
March 9, 201313 yr So, I've been reading up and it seems like the usual cause of a drive running in IDE emulation mode is AHCI not being enabled. However, I have only one drive showing up as hdX and it is running SLOW through preclear... While I have 5 other drives running normally (sdX) w/ a normal speed preclear... I can't swear to it but I'm really pretty sure I disabled IDE in BIOS before I even booted unraid, will have to go back and check... Is there any other culprit that would cause a single drive to run in IDE mode and none of the others? It is highly likely that it is on a different controller chip on the MB than the others and there is a second option in the BIOS for its mode. This is very common. I'll bet there are four SATA ports controlled by one BIOS setting, and two other ports by a different setting in the BIOS.
March 9, 201313 yr Author Still waiting for the preclear to finish but according to my manual I have only one ide/ahci/raid setting... Also, I noticed before the preclear when I ran dmesg|grep SATA|grep link to check for my new drives it showed them all as sata at 3.0Gbps... Is that contrary to the hdX designation in preclear and the slower read/write during preclear?
March 9, 201313 yr Author Just checked my preclears... 2 are running about 115 MB/s and the hda drive is running at only 13.7 MB/s...
March 9, 201313 yr Still waiting for the preclear to finish but according to my manual I have only one ide/ahci/raid setting... Also, I noticed before the preclear when I ran dmesg|grep SATA|grep link to check for my new drives it showed them all as sata at 3.0Gbps... Is that contrary to the hdX designation in preclear and the slower read/write during preclear? No, the "grep" you performed would have only printed the SATA drives. Although unlikely, it is possible your BIOS fixes some pports as IDE emulation to be able to boot an MS-Windows OS of Win-XP or prior. (They had no SATA drivers built in and could only boot from IDE drives, or emulated IDE drives) Joe L.
March 9, 201313 yr Author So, I've been looking around and found these benchmarks - http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=505 They show a very slight difference in sata drives running AHCI vs IDE mode my problem drive is running preclear at roughly 1/10th the speed of my other drives. Is there another factor that would cause this poor performance?
March 9, 201313 yr So, I've been looking around and found these benchmarks - http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=505 They show a very slight difference in sata drives running AHCI vs IDE mode my problem drive is running preclear at roughly 1/10th the speed of my other drives. Is there another factor that would cause this poor performance? bad drive, bad disk controller, bad ide emulation.
March 10, 201313 yr Author BLAM! After a day of speculation while I waited for 2 other drives to preclear, they finally finished, I canceled the preclear on the problem drive and got into BIOS. Turns out that although my controller was set to AHCI there was another setting called IDE Combined Mode. I disabled that and BIOS stopped seeing the drive, then save and exit, back into BIOS which now sees the drive properly and runs it in AHCI, booted back into Unraid and checked my preclear list which now shows the drive sdX. Preclear singing along happily now @ 120+ MB/s. Thanks for listening to me over analyze while I waited to get into BIOS!
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