Anyone have any idea why I'm getting a 6x difference in performance between two 
OS's on the exact same hardware?

/dev/disk0 and /dev/sda are the exact same internal SATA drive.


Mac OS X 10.6.5:

mingisapsycho:~ chris$ sudo dd if=/dev/disk0 of=/dev/zero bs=256k count=3814
Password:
3814+0 records in
3814+0 records out
999817216 bytes transferred in 56.340225 secs (17746064 bytes/sec)

Fedora 14:

[chris@macbook ~]$ sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/zero bs=256k count=3814
3814+0 records in
3814+0 records out
999817216 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 9.30449 s, 107 MB/s


If I repeat the commands a second time without rebooting, I get:

Mac OS:
999817216 bytes transferred in 55.951727 secs (17869282 bytes/sec)

Fedora:
999817216 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 0.312232 s, 3.2 GB/s

So clearly Fedora is caching the entire 1GB into RAM and Mac OS X is not 
caching at all. But is there some DMA + tagged queuing that Linux could be 
doing that Mac OS X is not? Or is there something hosed with dd on Mac OS X? 
Anecdotally I get similar performance differences between local file 
duplication whether it's Finder vs Nautilus or cp vs cp. So I'm not 
understanding what could explain such a massive difference. I get similar 
numbers for write performance as well.

Chris Murphy_______________________________________________
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