Some more datapoints relating to SATA -> PATA...

My empeg hard disk has been making funny noises, and is occasionally (although with increasing frequency) refusing to start up. I figured I'd try out the SATA situation.

I ordered two separate adapters, and have tried them with both a 500G WD drive, and a 120G Intel SSD, just with one drive at a time.

With the JMicron based one, the empeg didn't seem able to accurately identify the drives, for either drive.

With the Addonics adapter, the empeg was able to identify each drive properly.

I was able to partition and format the 500G drive with no problems. However, as Ross has experienced, the ethernet was broken with this adapter. Also, the USB was broken. Both work fine when I use the old PATA hard drive instead.

I've attached a boot log from this. There seems to be an issue detecting the ethernet adapter, and I can't help but wonder if I was able to force the kernel to look for it at a particular address, maybe it would work?


With the Intel SSD, things seem to go wrong when I start writing significant amounts of data to the drive. Trying to format a partition or install the bigdisk builder on it fails. I haven't catalogued the errors yet, but the most common one I see on the empeg display is hda: err: write_intr (which is obviously missing all the interesting stuff at the end). (The SSD works fine plugged into a SATA->USB converter on my PC.)

Is it possible that the SSD is just returning from writes too quickly? This seems unlikely: given that HDDs have caches I would expect many writes to return very quickly.

Anyway, my plan is to see if I can get some more details about the errors with the SSD, and maybe that will be helpful.

If anybody has ideas about what sort of logging / debugging might be useful for this, I'm all ears.

Richard.