[ltp] hdparm settings?

[Charles E Taylor IV]

On Fri, 18 Feb 2005 12:54:56 -0700
Nathan Kurz <nate@verse.com> wrote:

> Interesting.  On my X30 with a 40G drive (presumed 5400 RPM), I still
> get a consistent 18 MB/s, and can't get the 34 MB/s you are seeing.
> Playing with it a little bit, I see that adjusting multcount (-m) from
> 0 to 16 does not seem to affect the transfer speed, and that
> surprisingly adjusting 32-bit IO Support (-c) from off to on also has
> no effect.  I had been playing with readahead set very large (set with
> 'blockdev'), but lowering it also seemed to have no effect.

You'd think it would be 5400 RPM.  My machine is an X22.  I'm not sure how
different the X30 is from the X22, but you'd think they would put FASTER
drives in them - or at least equivalent drives.

> On desktop machines I've occasionally seen the speed double when
> adding 32-bit support, and since your speed is just about double mine
> that seems suspicious.  Anyone know if this setup should support
> 32-bit IO and have any idea why it might not be?

I tried turning off 32-bit IO support on my drive, and the speed
effectively remains the same.  33-35 MB/s.

Maybe part of the speed difference is a difference in kernels?  I'm
running Fedora Core 3 with a 2.6.9 series kernel (haven't upgraded to the
latest Fedora Core 3 kernel because of some unresolved suspend/sound/USB
issues with the latest FC3 kernel).

For reference, the info from the drive in my X22 looks like this:

# hdparm -i /dev/hda

/dev/hda:

 Model=HTS548040M9AT00, FwRev=MG2OA50A, SerialNo=MRL230L2G0J72B
 Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec Fixed DTR>10Mbs }
 RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=4
 BuffType=DualPortCache, BuffSize=7877kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16
 CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=78140160
 IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:240,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
 PIO modes:  pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4 
 DMA modes:  mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 
 UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5 
 AdvancedPM=yes: mode=0x80 (128) WriteCache=enabled
 Drive conforms to: ATA/ATAPI-6 T13 1410D revision 3a: 

-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------------
*  Charles Taylor <tomalek@mindspring.com>
*  Chemistry instructor / Mad scientist / Linux enthusiast!
--------------------------------------------------------------------
*  Web: http://home.mindspring.com/~charletiv/
--------------------------------------------------------------------