On Monday August 11 2003 03:50 pm, John Richard Smith wrote:
> Tom,
>
> Why does your previous example so much faster everything, what is
> it and how you configure that makes the difference ?
>
> John
Well, I'm reading this thread and seein the suggestions to use
hdparm parameters in rc.local or harddisks with some wonderment.
With Mandrake 9.x, you shouldn't need to configure any hdparm
parameters. Mandrake does it automatically unless it detects known
problem hardware or configurations, even without hdparm being
installed. IIRC this began with 8.2. Forcing hdparm parameters
should be done with caution. It can easily lead to file system
corruption. 'info hdparm' contains many warnings. So to answer
your question, I didn't do anything, Mandrake did it. I just use
quality hardware and ReiserFS 3.6.
So my good hdparm -Tt numbers (T=650mb/s, t=47mb/s) are due to
many factors, 9.2 current cooker and a Mandrake 2.4.22 kernel among
them. Mandrake is installed on the second hda partition, just after
the /swap partition. So both are on the fastest sections of the HDD
platters. Probly 40% faster than the outer edges of the platters.
True for all HDD's, newest to the older ones, inspite of rpm
speeds. Tho higher rpm drives will deliver better performance,
there's still the drop off as you go out on the platters.
VP_IDE: VIA vt8235 (rev 00) IDE UDMA133 controller on pci00:11.1
ide0: BM-DMA at 0xdc00-0xdc07, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA
ide1: BM-DMA at 0xdc08-0xdc0f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:DMA
That's a kt400a (pre-kt600) chipset runnin an overclocked XP
3000+ at 88 mhz higher than a 3200+ (176x13, 2288mhz). 512mb DDR400
ram runnin at DDR416 (416mhz) at CL2.5, 2-bank (a single 2-bank
stick). Vcore, IO, and AGP voltages, I raised above normal (+.1v
each). Two Maxtor 7200rpm, 2mb cache drives. One fairly new
ata/133, one an older ata/100 (altho dmesg shows both setup as
ata/133). No shared IRQ's, everything has it's own interrupt. To be
honest, the overclock has very little or nothing to do with HDD
performance, tho the PCI bus is at 35mhz.
The system will clock even faster, but I don't want the PCI bus
speeds getting too far off spec. That can actually hurt HDD and AGP
video performance/stability. Both of which use the PCI bus. My Abit
AGP nVidia GeF2 card doesn't even like 35mhz very much ;) So I set
the aperature to 4MB and set it to agp=1x, effectively disabling
sidebanding. I also don't use nvidia's closed source driver.
I particularly sought out a kt400a chipset board due to rave
reviews, better performance than nforce2 chipsets. My one week
experience with it certainly bears this out. Aopen AK77-400 Max/n
(AMD approv'd). My old Sparkle 300w PSU (also AMD apprv'd) puts
out extremely stable voltages, all a touch over spec. Rock steady
voltages are very important to high system performance, HHD's
included. Bottom line: I attribute my good HDD performance mostly
to the PSU, chipset/motherboard, Maxtor 7200 rpm's, and Mandrake.
BTW, the numbers I posted were with X and dozens of processes
runnin. As someone already correctly pointed out, hdparm -Tt needs
to be run several times and an average taken. I posted my average
numbers, actually some of my lower results. If you wanna cheat a
little, boot to level 3, kill all unnecessary processes, then run
hdparm -Tt. I'd rather have real world, as I use the system,
numbers tho ;) OTOH, hdparm -Tt numbers have little to do with
real world performance. FWIW, an I know this upsets some of y'all,
you'll never see good performance with a store bought ready made
system, or a laptop. If ya can't/won't do it yourself, find a good
trustworthy system builder to do it for you. If ya havt'a have a
laptop, you're just SOL ;>
--
Tom Brinkman Corpus Christi, Texas
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
