Re: PATA-disk named sda

From: Rene Herman
Date: Sat Jul 07 2007 - 17:40:48 EST


On 07/06/2007 02:30 PM, Christoph Pleger wrote:

And what about hdparm (setting 32bit I/O and multi-sector mode)? Suren wrote that 32bit I/O makes no sense when using DMA. Maybe that's right, but it does not correspond with my experiences. At least, I have the "feeling" that my IDE disks work much faster since I enabled 32bit support (DMA already was on before).

hdparm -t /dev/hda (or /dev/sda -- it works for the SD interface as well) is a quick test of a drive's sequential read speed.

I have, at the time, noticed at least on older controllers/drives (Intel 430 generation chipsets with things like 8G UDMA33 disks) that I could reliably increase the result with something like 1MB/s (to a total of 6 to 8, so it wasn't insignificant) by enabling 32-bit I/O. Had also understood that it shouldn't make a difference with DMA, but just went "oh well" and stuck a "hdparm -c1" in my bootup scripts.

(if anyone tries; note that hdparm -a can have a large effect on that result as well on some setups -- on machines where it does, -a 1024 usually gives me best results)

Rene.
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