Very poor hard disk performance (SATA)

[lat3ncy]

I recently fitted a Seagate 160GB SATA disk w/ NCQ and a maxtor SATA/PATA controller with promise TX2plus chipset. I formatted the disk using XFS and I am getting very slow performance on both read and write but especially write.

Benchmark show:

Tiotest results for 4 concurrent io threads:
,----------------------------------------------------------------------.
| Item | Time | Rate | Usr CPU | Sys CPU |
+-------------------+----------+--------------+----------+---------+
| Write 40 MBs | 8.6 s | 4.636 MB/s | 0.1 % | 59.0 % |

| Random Write 16 MBs | 11.9 s | 1.315 MB/s | 0.0 % | 2.5 % |

| Read 40 MBs | 0.1 s | 348.065 MB/s | 2.6 % | 90.5 % |

| Random Read 16 MBs | 0.0 s | 338.519 MB/s | 4.3 % | 93.1 % |
`----------------------------------------------------------------------'
Tiotest latency results:
,-------------------------------------------------------------------------.
| Item | Average latency | Maximum latency | % >2 sec | % >10 sec |
+--------------+-----------------+-----------------+----------+-----------+
| Write | 0.796 ms | 324.155 ms | 0.00000 | 0.00000 |
| Random Write | 0.040 ms | 2.776 ms | 0.00000 | 0.00000 |
| Read | 0.019 ms | 87.022 ms | 0.00000 | 0.00000 |
| Random Read | 0.010 ms | 0.039 ms | 0.00000 | 0.00000 |
|--------------+-----------------+-----------------+----------+-----------|
| Total | 0.300 ms | 324.155 ms | 0.00000 | 0.00000 |
`--------------+-----------------+-----------------+----------+-----------'

HDParm:

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 768 MB in 2.00 seconds = 383.87 MB/sec
HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(null) (wait for flush complete) failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
Timing buffered disk reads: 142 MB in 3.01 seconds = 47.11 MB/sec
HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(null) (wait for flush complete) failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device

This is what hardparm shows (although im aware it doesn't really support SATA)

/dev/sda:
HDIO_GET_MULTCOUNT failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
geometry = 19457/255/63, sectors = 160041885696, start = 0

I am using kernel 2.6.10 with the sata_promise driver as a module.

Does any one have any idea why this is happening and what I can do to fix it?

[AlchEmysT]

do and lspci from a livecd then from your install make sure all the same hardware is detected and loaded.

i had a similar problem and it was because i didn't have the proper chipset support for my mobo in the kernel
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