Re: slow ide drives

mlord (mlord@pobox.com)
Tue, 23 Apr 1996 11:11:36 -0400

Marty Leisner wrote:
>
> I couldn't understand why my ide disk access was so slow
> It was very slow in both dos and linux benchmarks...
>
> Here's results with hdparm -v -i -t /dev/hdc...
> The first is with the bios PIO3 disabled, then enabled...
>
> Does linux depend on any bios configuraiton, or does it interogate the
> hardware and act appriately (this was with 1.3.91).?

Linux relies on the BIOS to properly initialize most IDE interfaces.
There are a few IDE interfaces for which Linux itself includes some
specific initialization code.

The theory here is that Linux assumes that you will have already set
"optimal" values in your BIOS setup for the IDE drives (for DOS, WIN..),
so Linux really should not be overriding your settings.

> What's interesting is hdparm (2.7??Is there a way to get the version?)

Yeah. Just type hdparm and hit enter.

-ml