Dropping linux-ide as the HSM violation error was not reproducible even a second time and I have since switched controllers from Promise SATA300 TX4s (sata_promise) to Dawicontrol 4320 RAIDs (sil_3124 / sata_sil24). BTW the latter can have it's fakeraid firmware disabled via jumper, which also skips any long option ROM / init sequences during boot. When doing streaming seqential reads | writes on all four disk block devices in parallel I get close to 300MB/s in both cases, which is the limit for both the disk and controller hardware. Great driver! Before it starts sounding too much like spam - I've only been pounding the setup for a week, so no idea if it's really stable. Also I haven't tested for data corruption yet :) Cheers, C. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html