SATA Disk Write Cache Disabled

[Omar Aboubakr]

Hi Everyone,

I have just finished reconstructing my zpool and I now have 8 drives with different capacities and different models (temporarily for now) configured in RAIDZ-2.
While one of the disks was resilvering I have noticed that the performance of the pool degraded and some of the disks were hitting a 100% utilization I the have discovered the following:

pass5: <ST1000LM014-1EJ164 SM30> ACS-2 ATA SATA 3.x device
pass5: 300.000MB/s transfers (SATA 2.x, UDMA5, PIO 8192bytes)

protocol ATA/ATAPI-9 SATA 3.x
device model ST1000LM014-1EJ164
firmware revision SM30
serial number W771EE0J
WWN 5000c50089feb632
cylinders 16383
heads 16
sectors/track 63
sector size logical 512, physical 4096, offset 0
LBA supported 268435455 sectors
LBA48 supported 1953525168 sectors
PIO supported PIO4
DMA supported WDMA2 UDMA6
media RPM 5400

Feature Support Enabled Value Vendor
read ahead yes yes
write cache yes no
flush cache yes yes
overlap no
Tagged Command Queuing (TCQ) no no
Native Command Queuing (NCQ) yes 32 tags
NCQ Queue Management no
NCQ Streaming no
Receive & Send FPDMA Queued no
SMART yes yes
microcode download yes yes
security yes no
power management yes yes
advanced power management yes no 0/0x00
automatic acoustic management no no
media status notification no no
power-up in Standby no no
write-read-verify yes no 0/0x0
unload yes yes
general purpose logging yes yes
free-fall no no
Data Set Management (DSM/TRIM) no
Host Protected Area (HPA) yes no 1953525168/1953525168
HPA - Security no

and

pass3: <Hitachi HDS722020ALA330 JKAOA20N> ATA8-ACS SATA 2.x device
pass3: 300.000MB/s transfers (SATA 2.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes)

protocol ATA/ATAPI-8 SATA 2.x
device model Hitachi HDS722020ALA330
firmware revision JKAOA20N
serial number JK1101YAG6UTGV
WWN 5000cca221c31b09
cylinders 16383
heads 16
sectors/track 63
sector size logical 512, physical 512, offset 0
LBA supported 268435455 sectors
LBA48 supported 3907029168 sectors
PIO supported PIO4
DMA supported WDMA2 UDMA6
media RPM 7200

Feature Support Enabled Value Vendor
read ahead yes yes
write cache no no
flush cache yes yes
overlap no
Tagged Command Queuing (TCQ) no no
Native Command Queuing (NCQ) yes 32 tags
NCQ Queue Management no
NCQ Streaming no
Receive & Send FPDMA Queued no
SMART yes yes
microcode download yes yes
security yes no
power management yes yes
advanced power management yes no 0/0x00
automatic acoustic management yes no 254/0xFE 128/0x80
media status notification no no
power-up in Standby yes no
write-read-verify no no
unload no no
general purpose logging yes yes
free-fall no no
Data Set Management (DSM/TRIM) no
Host Protected Area (HPA) yes no 3907029168/3907029168
HPA - Security no

I noticed that those two disks have write cache disabled.

• The first one is a Seagate SSHD with support for write cache but disabled for some reason.
• The second is a Hitachi drive with no support for write. It's worth noting though, that I have checked the drive with Hitachi feature and the drive had it's write cache disabled and I went ahead and enabled it but that didn't really change anything.

All other 6 disks in the pool have their write cache enabled and working fine.
If you can guys have any ideas on how to tackle this, I'd greatly appreciate it.

 

[rs225]

If these are connected to the motherboard, you might check in the BIOS or UEFI whether the write cache has been set disabled on any of them.

 

[Omar Aboubakr]

If these are connected to the motherboard, you might check in the BIOS or UEFI whether the write cache has been set disabled on any of them.

Thanks rs255. Unfortunately there isn't anything in the BIOS settings related to this.

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