I've moved one of the IDE cards to the 64 bit bus and thats improved things a
lot. The 2nd card isnt 3.3v capable and won't go into the 64 bit slot though
so I'm going to replace it.
I noticed using vmstat that the average latency (await) is over 50ms for the card on the secondary PCI bus and less than 20ms on the 64 bit bus... Very interesting...
Glad it's not going to be a total loss.
I find AMD's behaviour over this bug to be very disappointing - motherboards using this broken south bridge can still be purchased today and the box does not state "Secondary PCI bus throughput limited to +- 25MB/s". You will not find this problem mentioned on their website either.
The board I tested is only 9 months old and when I pulled the SCSI card and discs and placed them on the 33MHz bus of an equivalent dual Xeon board, the throughput went up to +-90MB/s.
I was a big AMD fan prior to this, as the bang for the buck is way better, but the time, money and effort wasted left a bad taste.
Regards,
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