Second Hard Drive Oddities

Cryogen Glacien · n00b Joined: 06 Sep 2004 Posts: 32

I've noticed this under Windows as well as Linux...I have 2 SATA hard drives in my rig. The first is a 40 GB Maxtor one that holds the Windows XP system and program files, as well as all of Linux except /home, /tmp, and /var. The second is a 200 GB Seagate Barracuda that holds my Windows XP personal files and, as mentioned, /home, /var, and /tmp.

Anyway, I've seen that the big drive seems to be very slow to respond to a request for a file. Afterwards, it runs fine...for a few seconds. Then it slows down again. It's almost as if the drive is shutting off if it's not accessed for more than 10 seconds or so, and I'm guessing this is a hardware thing since it's happening on both OSes. What's going on, and how do I fix it?
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frostschutz · Advocate Joined: 22 Feb 2005 Posts: 2977 Location: Germany

hard drives do have a timeout setting, if enabled the drive will spin down after a specified time, for power saving purposes. Of course the drive response will be a lot slower when you first access it again after that, since it first has to spin up again. In Linux, at least for IDE drives, you can change this setting using the -S option of hdparm. I don't know if this works for SATA too, since I still don't have those...

However, if your drive gets slow even if it is being used constantly (e.g. reading a very big file and it gets very slow while doing that), I would rather assume that there is a hardware problem with the drive itself. In that case, you should backup your important data ASAP if you haven't done so already.

adaptr · Posted: Tue Nov 29, 2005 10:26 pm Post subject:

If the SATA chipset is using the SCSI interface (it might on Linux, it won't on Windows) then you cannot set those parameters, but I doubt that that is the issue in any case.

First check your BIOS settings for any obvious anomalies, like (U)DMA or PIO settings, block transfer sizes, and power saving settings.

Next, what do you get if you benchmark performance in Linux using hdparm ?
The 40GB drive should yield at least 30MB/sec, while the larger one will go up to 50 MB/sec or above, depending on the size of its cache.

If you cannot at least meet those minimums then there is indeed something wrong on the hardware level.

That both drives would be faulty is hard to believe, however - it is more likely that the SATA chipset on the mainboard is to blame.
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augury · l33t Joined: 22 May 2004 Posts: 722 Location: philadelphia

You can use hdparm -S for sata. Doesn't complain. sdparm is for sata but it's a bit more advanced than hdparm. Some drives can save these settings can't they? Which would carry over into the gentoo.

Cryogen Glacien · n00b Joined: 06 Sep 2004 Posts: 32

I think it's probably a powersaving thing...the BIOS do seem to be set for "maximum power saving." The drive spins up a lot, yes, and it seems to "time out" after either 30 or 60 seconds, not sure exactly. I'll try tweaking that setting and see.
_________________
~Tall Dark and Bishoujo Computing~
Home PC: "Chikane" (ATX, AMD64 3700+)
School PC: "Hazuki" (uATX, AMD64 3500+)