OK, found hdparm (would have sworn I'd already tried /sbin, but I guess not.
Seems my drives are running in 16-bit mode. When I switch them to
32-bit mode, drive performance nearly doubles (from 2.6-3.7 up to
6.3-6.7 MB/sec). How do I convince it I want it to run in 32-bit mode
all the time.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that numbers less than 14 MB/sec
indicate that the drive is not properly configured (as 33 MB/sec is what
you could maximally get out of pre UDMA drives). Someone please correct
me if I'm wrong.
My other (older) laptop also seems to default to 16-bit mode, but it's
numbers are [16-bit] 7.59 MB/sec & [32-bit] 7.62 MB/sec. I'd expect my
new laptop with a 20GB drive (same height and spindle speed) to be
faster than the old 4GB drive. Am I off base here, or not?
- Theo
Theo Brinkman wrote:
> I am running Mandrake 8.0 on my Toshiba Satellite 2805-S402 (one of
> the nice shiny ones with the GeForce2Go). The performance is great
> except for one aspect. The hard drive performance under Linux seems
> to be much worse than under Win2K. I ran hdparm -t shortly before I
> did a reinstall hoping I might spot an elusive option that might
> help. In the process of the reinstall, I seem to have missed the
> package with hdparm in it, so I can't be sure, but I'm not seeing any
> performance (it takes less time for my old PII 233 Satellite 4000 to
> load up Mozilla). Once things are loaded into memory, performance is
> great, but it takes almost 10 seconds for a terminal window to pop up
> the first time, but only about 1 second for a second one.
>
> What can I do to boost hard disk performance. I've got /, /usr/local,
> and /home set up as ReiserFS partitions, and /boot as ext2 (that
> little trick let me upgrade my kernel in 7.1 without the ReiserFS
> filesystem work-around, so I kept with it).
>
> I can't verify it until I find the rpm which contains hdparm, but I
> think I remember the result of hdparm -t was 2.6 or 6.2 Mb/sec.
> Obviously, either of those is FAR slower than it should be.
>
> - Theo
>
>
>
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