Re: Lower HD transfer rate with NCQ enabled?

[Nick Piggin]

Paa Paa wrote:
> I'm using Linux 2.6.20.4. I noticed that I get lower SATA hard drive 
> throughput with 2.6.20.4 than with 2.6.19. The reason was that 2.6.20 
> enables NCQ by defauly (queue_depth = 31/32 instead of 0/32). Transfer 
> rate was measured using "hdparm -t":
>
> With NCQ (queue_depth == 31): 50MB/s.
> Without NCQ (queue_depth == 0): 60MB/s.
>
> 20% difference is quite a lot. This is with Intel ICH8R controller and 
> Western Digital WD1600YS hard disk in AHCI mode. I also used the next 
> command to cat-copy a biggish (540MB) file and time it:
>
> rm temp && sync && time sh -c 'cat quite_big_file > temp && sync'
>
> Here I noticed no differences at all with and without NCQ. The times 
> (real time) were basically the same in many successive runs. Around 19s.
>
> Q: What conclusion can I make on "hdparm -t" results or can I make any 
> conclusions? Do I really have lower performance with NCQ or not? If I 
> do, is this because of my HD or because of kernel?

What IO scheduler are you using? If AS or CFQ, could you try with deadline?

--
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.
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