how to speed up harddisk access in iBook 2.2 ?

ruben · Guru Joined: 04 Jul 2003 Posts: 462

As of late, disk access seems to be really slow on my iBook. The main partition is 12Gb, with 800Mb free, fstype Ext3. (kernel 2.4.21-ben2)

Each time i load a big program, like mozilla, i have to wait rather long untill the program pops up, while cpu-load remains at <10%.

Any ideas what causes this (is it a 'problem' that my disk is for 95% full ?) and how to speed up harddisk access ? Should i use hdparm ? Should i switch to ReiserFS ? (i read about this in another post, but i'd prefer trying other things first) Any configuration hints welcome

zojas · Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2003 9:18 am Post subject:

the first thing is to make sure dma access is turned on. (use 'hdparm /dev/hda' it will tell you if dma is on or not)

I've seen ext3 get confused before when you fill it with a few large files then try to delete them. it still thought the file system was full. my solution was to switch to reiserfs.

when I switched all the partitions (except /boot) on my ibook to reiser, I noticed a large jump in the performance of qpkg. qpkg is faster for me now than epm!
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ruben · Guru Joined: 04 Jul 2003 Posts: 462

root@guava ruben # hdparm /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
multcount = 16 (on)
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq = 1 (on)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 8 (on)
geometry = 58140/16/63, sectors = 58605120, start = 0