IDE performance question

From: Ray L (rayl@mail.com)
Date: Thu Feb 03 2000 - 03:55:09 EST

hi folks

i have an IDE performance question:

i've just put together an athlon 500 on a MS-6167 motherboard, and
i'm using an IBM deskstar DPTA-372050 20 Gig drive. i'm running
2.2.15pre5 and mandrake 7.0. i've tuned the IDE subsystem using the
/proc settings, and am getting fairly close to the rated throughput
(lmbench tells me 20.9/22.3 MB/s on R/W, ibm says 22.9)

however, i do experience system pauses while the disk is in heavy
use. for example, while a large tar is going on, an 'ls' might take
up to 2 seconds to return in another xterm. i did not observe this
behavior on my old system (4 gig barracuda scsi on DPT controller).

is this normal for large IDE drives, or have i missed some config parm?
in particular, what is up with the write-only pio_mode below? should
i be setting that to some particular value?

here's my settings at the moment:

root@stingray# cat /proc/ide/hda/settings
name value min max mode
---- ----- --- --- ----
bios_cyl 2495 0 65535 rw
bios_head 255 0 255 rw
bios_sect 63 0 63 rw
breada_readahead 4 0 127 rw
bswap 0 0 1 r
file_readahead 124 0 2097151 rw
io_32bit 1 0 3 rw
keepsettings 1 0 1 rw
max_kb_per_request 64 1 127 rw
multcount 8 0 8 rw
nice1 1 0 1 rw
nowerr 0 0 1 rw
pio_mode write-only 0 255 w
slow 0 0 1 rw
unmaskirq 1 0 1 rw
using_dma 1 0 1 rw

any clues appreciated, thanks 

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Ray Lehtiniemi (rayl@mail.com) (rayl@optitech.com)

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