On Tue, 6 Dec 2005, David Lockwood wrote:
Hi. Just starting to investigate the joys of hdparm. I was doing some data shifting between partitions and noticed (using mc, runlevel 3) that the data transfer rate was only about 1.5MB/s (copying from an ntfs partition to a reiserfs). Here's the output of #hdparm -i /dev/hdai.e. dma wasn't turned on at all. So as a newbie I follow a few leads on hd optimising among the few options not listed as dangerous in man hdparm and settle on # hdparm -c 1 -X udma2 and transfer rate increased to about 2.8MB/s.
I have no view on what would be a reasonable transfer rate from ntfs to reiser, but that certainly sounds slow. This is hda, but you mention an intel SATA controller later.
(i) is this a SATA drive ? If it is, you should be using libata (under SCSI) in the kernel, and /dev/sda.
(ii) check your kernel config - build in the chipsets that are present (both for ATA, and for SATA if relevant). If in doubt, build in *all* the chipset-support options under ATA/ATAPI/ and similarly all the SATA chipsets under scsi low-level drivers if you have SATA. Finally, ensure that you select 'Use PCI DMA by default when available' under ATA/ATAPI/.
In general, hdparm -t (or -Tt) is safe and sometimes worthwhile to give a quick overview. Anything more exotic is usually a sign of one or more of the following
(a) inadequate kernel .config (b) broken hardware (c) excessively-new hardware not yet fully supported. Ken -- das eine Mal als Trag?die, das andere Mal als Farce
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