SATA Hard Drive Corruption with Folding@Home

Matir · 04-26-2005, 12:55 PM

I have noticed something twice now: within 24 hours of starting use of the Folding@Home client on my main desktop, files have become corrupt on my SATA hard drive. I therefore consider 3 possible "causes":

1. Folding@Home does something weird.
2. SATA drive/controller does not like heat produced by 100% CPU
3. Coincidence

The first time, I thought the drive was bad, sent it back to Seagate for RMA, and got a refurb model. It had thrown a lot of DriveReady SeekComplete Error messages in dmesg.

The second time, not so many errors, so I think I stopped it earlier.

Running "badblocks" finds no problems.

I guess I'm trying to figure out what causes this. I've restored all my data from a backup to another partition (on a PATA drive) and taken the SATA sortof "out of rotation".

My SATA Chipset Information: (lspci -vvv)

Code:

0000:00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82801EB (ICH5) SATA Controller (rev 02) (prog-if 8f [Master SecP SecO PriP PriO])
        Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc.: Unknown device 80a6
        Control: I/O+ Mem- BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B-
        Status: Cap- 66Mhz+ UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR-
        Latency: 0
        Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 18
        Region 0: I/O ports at efe0
        Region 1: I/O ports at efac [size=4]
        Region 2: I/O ports at efa0 [size=8]
        Region 3: I/O ports at efa8 [size=4]
        Region 4: I/O ports at ef90 [size=16]

SATA Drive Infromation:

Code:

  Vendor: ATA       Model: ST3120026AS       Rev: 3.18

Kernel SATA-Related data:

Code:

CONFIG_SCSI_ATA=y
CONFIG_SCSI_ATA_PIIX=y

Thoughts?

ironwalker · 04-26-2005, 02:13 PM

Never had high heat corrupt a drive sata or ata.
Never had F@H corrupt a drive either.
I have had higher overclocks corrupt a drive though...are you overclocked at all or have been messing with the bios and if so which bios functions did you change?

A loose cable could corrupt drives...switching on and off.

Useing lmsensors or similar whats the temps on your machine after 5minutes at 100% cpu power?

Also full specs of hardware please...thank you

Matir · 04-26-2005, 02:39 PM

Processor: Intel Pentium 4 @ 2.8 GHz (not overclocked)
Motherboard: Asus P4C800-E Deluxe (Intel 875P chipset)
Memory: 2x512 Corsair DDR 3200 (memtest86+ confirmed memory ok)

Not that I know if any of the following is relevant, I might as well post it:
3 hard drives, 2 optical drives:

Code:

hda: ST380013A, ATA DISK drive
hdb: LITE-ON DVDRW SOHW-812S, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdc: Maxtor 92041U4, ATA DISK drive
hdd: COMBO-52X16C, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive

Plus the SATA drive mentioned above.

Video Card: ATI Radeon 9200 SE
Kernel (uname -a): Linux ozone 2.6.11-gentoo-r6-ozone #2 SMP Thu Apr 21 02:17:13 EDT 2005 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

No BIOS changes as of late. All cables are properly seated. I will try to get lmsensors readings later, though I am not yet 100% sure if lmsensors is reading properly. Running 'sensors' as non-root segfaulted just now and MAY have crashed my whole computer. (It has stopped responding)

Matir · 04-28-2005, 05:32 PM

My computer was indeed brought down by the 'sensors' command: not quite sure why. Anyway, it works now and shows my CPU (at idle) around 38 deg C. Tonight I'll be rebuilding some software and I'll check temps then.