I am running Debian Woody on a K7 850Mhz system with 384MB of RAM. My motherboard is an Abit KT7-RAID with VIA chipset and VIA IDE controllers. I have a Western Digital 60GB WDC600BB UDMA 100 hard drive, currently running only UDMA 66. I have the RAID controller disabled for simplicity sake (that may be a mistake as only the RAID controller will do UDMA 100).
My question is this: Whenever I do any kind of "heavy" disk access, such as copying large files (10MB+), the CPU usage sky rockets and my system reacts slowly. Why? And how do I fix this? I have DMA access disabled with hdparm. If I enable it, the system promptly locks hard. I have multicount enabled at 16. 32-bit i/o is enabled. readahead is enabled at 8. busstate is 1 (not sure what that is.) I am sure there is a simple answer to my question, but I have tinkered with this thing for too long now. I can't seem to figure it out. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Please copy me at [EMAIL PROTECTED] on any replies as I am not subscribed to this list. Thank you. Jon
