please help me.About ich8 southbridge and sata2 HD.thanks.

[chen1960]

I'm a newbie.
please excuse my poor english.thanks.
my hardware system : CPU core dou 2 E6300 MB biostar 965PT (with ich8 southbridge) MEM: DDR2 667 1G HD :WD 250GYS SATA2
I use gentoo installer livecd to install gentoo. At first ,I use "gentoo doscsi" options to boot system.but kernel didn't found SATA HD.so i use "gentoo all-generic-ide" options to boot .because ich8 didn't support AHCI and NCQ.(i guess that)
i use hdparm to tweak HD performance .
result :

hdparm -i /dev/hda
/dev/hda:

Model=WDC WD2500YS-01SHB0, FwRev=20.06C03, SerialNo=WD-WCANY1902669
Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec SpinMotCtl Fixed DTR>5Mbs FmtGapReq }
RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=50
BuffType=unknown, BuffSize=16384kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16
CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=268435455
IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
PIO modes: pio0 pio3 pio4
DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2
AdvancedPM=no WriteCache=enabled
Drive conforms to: Unspecified: ATA/ATAPI-1 ATA/ATAPI-2 ATA/ATAPI-3 ATA/ATAPI-4 ATA/ATAPI-5 ATA/ATAPI-6 ATA/ATAPI-7

* signifies the current active mode

hdparm -tT /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
Timing cached reads: 3652 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1826.44 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 38 MB in 3.11 seconds = 12.22 MB/sec

hdparm -a 1 -A 1 -u 1 -m 16 /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
setting multcount to 16
setting unmaskirq to 1 (on)
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
setting drive read-lookahead to 1 (on)
multcount = 16 (on)
unmaskirq = 1 (on)
using_dma = 1 (on)

/dev/hda:
Timing cached reads: 3708 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1852.97 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 36 MB in 3.05 seconds = 11.80 MB/sec

Why HD performance is so lower? How i can change it?
please help me ,thanks very much.

[BradN]

I think the problem is that you're not using a native SATA driver. If you're only testing under the livecd, I wouldn't worry about the performance too much, and after you compile your own kernel, you should be able to make sure the right driver is included, and performance should be a lot better.

Hope this helps

[chen1960]

Thanks BradN.I will try to complie system . Hope it can be change .
Thanks again.

[BradN]

Another quick note - once you reboot with the new kernel, your hard drive will probably be "sda" not "hda" - so keep that in mind when you edit /etc/fstab.