Re: 3ware 9550SX problems - mke2fs incredibly slow writing last third of inode tables

[Florian Weimer]

* Alex Bligh:

> I /think/ what had happened is this: When I press F8 to exit the
> BIOS, it did not initialize the array (this is in accordance with the
> manual, it being deferred). Despite leaving the machine idle in the O/S
> for 2 days, it didn't start initializing the array. Running the mkfs
> started the initialization (would that make sense)? The second time
> I ran mkfs, I may have already (somehow) triggered it to start earlier.
>
> I shall try and work out some soak test I can run on it this w/e.

Please check the write cache settings and report the results.
(There's a closed-source command line utility which can report the
status in an unambiguous way.)

If the system doesn't wait on I/O, this means that all I/O is cached
by the controller, which in turn suggests that the write cache is
turned on (with obvious consequences).
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