[mythtv-users] Symptoms of not enough PS wattage

[Roger Heflin]

Don Lewis wrote:
> On 19 Sep, Roger Heflin wrote:
> 
>> I have a via board, and if I tax (use) the onboard via sata chips then
>> things get choppy on the PCI bus, the pchdtv card looses data several
>> times a second, and after hours of use tends to lockup, the 150 cards
>> give errors about losing data, in my case it appears to be just a
>> badly designed MB.   If I use the sata ports on the PCI bus things
>> are slow but I don't have any issues.
> 
> It might be possible to fix this by doing some latency timer tuning.
> 
> As a possible quick and dirty workaround, you might try strapping the
> drives so that they claim to be SATA I to reduce the peak bus bandwidth
> requirements.
>

I did not want to mess with it anymore, it works with the PCI card channels, and 
I have enough of them, and it is only a little faster since I still have to have 
some drives on the PCI bus anyway (too many for the MB).

And they were already jumpered to sata I, the specific VIA chipset won't work 
with SATA2 and does not handle properly telling the drive to run sataI.   This 
chipset and others like it are likely why at least some disk vendors jumper 
their drives to default to sata1.    And it appears that the VIA sata ports and 
the PCI bus share the same 66mhz x 32bit bus, and with both running things work 
badly on the PCI bus, it is likely that some tuning could make it work, but just 
duplicating it consistently was not always possible so it is hard to test.

                               Roger