Hard drive performance

bako · 11-17-2000, 05:32 AM

For some strange reason it does work when I rename the symlink to S01hdspeedup

Anyone??? can I only create Sxx scripts in the rcx.d dir's and why is that??? (I was thinking the letter S and the numbers were to set the startup sequence like S01scriptname is started before S99scriptname and something like T12scriptname would be started after S99scriptname)

jeremy · 11-17-2000, 09:10 AM

bako,
Anything that starts with an S will be passed the parameter start, anything that starts with a K will be passed the parameter stop (K for kill) and anything else will be ignored.

jtshaw · 11-17-2000, 07:38 PM

I ran the test on polarcat's Maxtor IDE and her IBM Deskstar 75GXP and got the following...oh, btw, the drives are on a Promise Ultra100 controller:

Maxtor:
/dev/hdg:
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 3.31 seconds = 19.34 MB/sec

IBM:
/dev/hde:
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.85 seconds = 34.59 MB/sec

antken · 11-21-2000, 01:21 PM

i am using A 2GB seagate IDE and i get:

64 MB in 13.76 seconds = 4.65 MB/SEC

tony · 11-24-2000, 05:31 PM

I increased the amount of swap space and the performance of my distribution dramatically increased, visibly. I was using 20megs swap space and I could see linux always working my hard-drive, now I give it about 120 megs swap space and the performance has dramatically increased.

mathi · 12-01-2000, 02:43 AM

I run a Pentiun 166 with a Maxtor 54098U8 with is a 40GB harddisk. (Nice detail: BIOS and W98 only sees the first 8.4 Gb, LInux can adress it all). Maxtor claims it uses
ATA-5/Ultra DMA 66 and can reach read-speeds of 66,7 MB/s. But I can't squeeze more than 5.5 - 6 MB/s out of it, as reported with hdparm. I've tried a lot of optimalization-scemes. Any good ideas or should I just buy a new computer? (I'm going to do that anyway).

gr

Matthieu

bako · 12-01-2000, 03:03 AM

Did you try the command ?

Code:

hdparm -c 1 -d 1 -k 1 /dev/hda

because it seems to me that an IDE harddisk like that should do at least 10MB or more per second... (when DMA is enabled and I/O set to 32bits ofcourse

)

mathi · 12-01-2000, 06:17 AM

Yes, I did. My kernel supports IDE-DMA and I tried all kinds of PIO, but I fear that my motherboard has an old IDE interface. Right now I cannot try anything, 'cause I'm in office, but the -c 1 and the -d 1 settings almost doubles the hard disk speed (normally 3 MB/s). But that's not much compared to the speeds Maxtor promises.
Thanks for your reply and I hope you or someone else has any good ideas.

gr

Matthieu

bako · 12-01-2000, 06:30 AM

With an old motherboard / IDE interface I guess its perhaps time to look for a new one???
Because it seems a shame that you use such a fast disk on just a P166, maybe we'll trade *smile* you get my 3GB harddisk with atleast 9MB/sec and I'll take the maxtor

mathi · 12-01-2000, 07:28 AM

Yeah, I guess you're right, but I was hoping to use this machine as a file-server in the future. I think I'll put a old disk in it and make a nice and humble fire-wall/multicaster/whatever out of it (sigh). Although it was a good machine, and it ran XWindow with Gnome/KDE2 quite fast.

bako · 12-01-2000, 07:44 AM

Might I suggest FREESCO as "distribution" for the router/firewall because in that case there's no need for IDE cause the complete router/firewall runs of one 3,5"
floppy.

For more information http://www.freesco.org

And might I ask that configuring is really easy, 1 machine, 1 floppy and 15 to 30 minutes is more than enough to configure a flawless router/firewall....

mathi · 12-01-2000, 08:20 AM

Hmm, looks nice. I'm going to try it right away! It will be a releaf after a long day of NT.

vu_lan · 12-05-2000, 11:02 PM

I am using RedHat 6.2 distribution and my system has a harddrive WDC IDE 5400RPM. I am getting a poor performance rate of 7MB/sec after turning using

/hdparm -c 1 -d 1 -k 1 /dev/hda

1) How much performance will I get if I am using 7200RPM IDE drive?

2) When using the command above it seems that "dma" is turned on. What about "udma"? Any feature I can turn this feature on?

3) Any other techniques to get my hard drive runs faster?

Thanks

mathi · 12-06-2000, 01:47 AM

May I suggest reading the exact specifications of your disk, read the man page of hdparm, and next page:

http://www.linuxforum.com/plug/artic...dforspeed.html

(I read it all, and it didn't help me. See earlier posts.

vu_lan · 12-06-2000, 11:36 AM

Thank you Mathi. That page is really helpful.

Regards