Not a problem, but perhaps this will help someone else. Background: My Thinkpad T60 has a 500GB SATA drive. When I travel with it, I bring along an identical 500GB drive in an Ultrabay swap tray for backups. I could dd copy the main drive to the swap drive in about 3 hours, overnight.
Then something went wrong. On the last trip, it took >4 days. hdparm -t for the main drive is 50MB/s . The Ultrabay drive ran at an abysmal 1.3MB/s. I could not set dma mode with hdparm -d1 . After some failed debugging, I ordered a SATA enclosure and Expressbus SATA card, which will arrive today. Last night, I found the problem. The BIOS settings for the SATA controller somehow got changed from AHCI mode to Compatability mode. When I set the BIOS to AHCI, hdparm -t went back to 79MB/sec. Back to 3 hours. Some windoze folks have problems with AHCI unless they load the right Intel drivers. So the default is Compatability mode, even if it makes the Ultrabay slow as hell. BTW, the T60 Ultrabay actually has a PATA interface, and the swap tray has a translator chip to SATA in it. Kludge! The newer Thinkpads feed both SATA and PATA to the Ultrabay, IIRC. I expect the SATAII connection will be quite a bit faster, since I will be using different buses to stream the data from drive to drive. But since the goal was to back up the drive overnight when travelling, shaving the time under 3 hours is not an urgent need. Maybe faster will be needful when I upgrade to >1TB laptop drives, though I'm using "only" 140GB now. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
