Hey,

The closer I look at the 8.2 install I did on this new Abit nForce board the
more glitches I discover.

In the course of tracking down why the kupdated daemon would periodically
guzzle CPU time whenever I did a lot of disk I/O I discovered (via hdparm)
that my two Maxtor 80 drives (which I'm hoping to use for a partial soft
raid setup later on) were about as poorly configured as possible.

Running hdparm with the -Tt benchmark flag showed a pathetic 3.2 mb/sec for
buffered disk reads (buffered cache reads were 297.57).

I tried tweaking them for the ATA100 channel they're installed on thusly:

hdparm -c1 -d1 -X69 /dev/hda

but got a rather unexpected message back:

setting 32-bit I/O support flag to 1
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
setting xfermode to 69 (UltraDMA mode 5)
ide0: Speed warning UDMA 3/4/5 is not functional
I/O support = 1 (32-bit)
using_dma = 1 (on)

I did another benchmark run and got 22.15mb/sec. Checking hdparm -i /dev/hda
it claims the disk is actually running in UDMA 2 mode. A friend with a
Western Digital drive (ATA100, 7200rpm, 40gb) gets around 40mb/sec in UDMA 5
mode for buffered disk reads. He's running RedHat 7.2 which I believe has a
similiar kernel version.

Seems like there's a lot of possible problems (bad install, bad hardware,
wrong drivers, disks that are too new to be well supported, motherboard
that's too new to be supported...)

Anyone have a similiar experience or a good idea of where to start?

cheers,
::mark



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