Hello, Happy New Year and thanks for a fabulous new aptosid! 
I'm trying to install the "imera 2011-02" live CD (and more recently "ponos 2011-03" on a USB stick) onto a 120GB SanDisk Ultra SSD, following the fine manual religiously, having read and re-read all GPT docs and most articles+reviews on the web about SSDs. Unfortunately the SSD keeps disconnecting and becomes unusable, no longer appearing in fdisk -l until after powercycling the SSD (rebooting the PC).
I tried using gdisk and also using cfdisk to partition the drive, both with sectors aligned and non-aligned, in case my partitioning was to blame. I just wanted to check that I'm not making stupid mistakes before I RMA the drive.
After GPT partitioning (with gdisk, making a BIOS Boot Partition, a swap partition and a Linux partition, all verified fine), attempts to create a filesystem using mkfs.ext4 cause the SSD to become inaccessible - here are errors in the log from /var/log/syslog:
Code:
ata3: lost interrupt (Status 0x58)
ata3: drained 512 bytes to clear DRQ
ata3.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
ata3.00: failed command: IDENTIFY DEVICE
[...]
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 4917250
[...]
sda: detected capacity change from 120034123776 to 0
This behaviour is repeatable. Rebooting the machine, I can see the SSD fine, until I try and write a filesystem onto it. Since doing this before Christmas, I have retried with the new aptosid 2011-03 and get exactly the same thing happening. I had high hopes for ponos since the changelog mentioned improved support for GPT/SSDs, but it looks like the problem is with this particular SSD or even the entire controller family, which would be a shame as they otherwise seem a good buy. I know all about the BSOD issues in Windows with SandForce 2281 controllers. I'm unsure which SF controller is in the SanDisk Ultra, as Wikipedia says SF2200, but a detailed review says the older SF1200 previous-generation. This article has some comments:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4973/sand ... y?all=true
Quote:
"If your non-SF drive dies or is problematic, you can just swap it out with the vendor or retailer. If your SF22xx drive BSOD/Disconnects/etc,, you can't do too much about it. The problem is with all the 22xxs." -ckryan
Quote:
"It's great that there is a fix for the second generation drives, but what about the first generation? I have 2 SF-1200 drives that disconnect randomly after waking up from S3." - Quad5Ny
I read the single post in Sandisk's Support Forum about Ultra SSDs. I emailed support and their only answer was that Googling (they didn't actually know themselves!) showed some reports of problems, and I should try other cables and PCs, which I did, using my new Phenom X6 1055T workstation (also non-UEFI). My friend also had the same error with an OCZ (same/similar SandForce controller):
http://www.jumpstation.co.uk/flog/Aug20 ... 0820112146 |
