poor hd performace

HOHCEHC · n00b Joined: 10 May 2004 Posts: 32

hello i have p3 katmai 600mhz with 440bx asus motherboard and 7200 maxtor 2 mb cache harddrive and i get very poor results with hdparm
my dma and I/O 32 bit are enabled. I am using 2.6.5 r1 kernel.
when i do hdparm -t /dev/hda i get `18m/b. Before this harddrive was in my pentium 4 machine and i was getting `35m/b with hdparm.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun May 16, 2004 10:02 am Post subject:

HOHCEHC,

I suspect that the 440BX does not support the higher UDMA modes to get the higher data rate. Alternatively, you may not be using an 80 conductor ribbon cable for the drive. Thats essential.
Do you have a slow device, like a CDROM on the same IDE cable.

eNTi · Posted: Sun May 16, 2004 10:35 am Post subject:

i found that my sata drive (with sata pci controller from promise) would run on udma 6 on my 300Mhz amd-k6/2. the problem: i'll get only 9MB/s on this machine. on my athlon xp2000+ i'll get 54MB/s. so i think it's the processor that's slowing down the whole party.
_________________
If you fall off a cliff, you might as well try to fly. After all, you got nothing to lose.

-- John Sheridan - Babylon 5, Season 4

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun May 16, 2004 12:26 pm Post subject:

eNTi,

Since you have UDMA6 advertised the transfer rate from the drive to the PCI card will be OK. Your problem will be PCI card to main memory.

Check that your PCI system has Bus Mastering enabled and that your SATA card is plugged into a slot that can support Bus Mastering.

PCI will do a lot better than 9Mb/sec.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.