I have experienced problems getting ATA100 drives to do DMA with ATA33/66 mobos before. Its normally a matter of your HDD and chipset being unable to decide a speed to work at ( IDE is such a crappy standard..) The solution was to grab a utility from the manufacturers website and set the drive to use the same speed your chipset supports.
Daniel Barclay wrote: > I've been having trouble using hdparm to speed up one of my disks. > > I suspect it's because I had to disable the disk in my BIOS so the > BIOS wouldn't hang when booting. > > Has anyone seen this problem or does anyone know how to fix it? > Would the "-ide" version of the 2.2.19 kernel packge help with this? > > > > ROUGH DETAILS: > > Initially, my three disks had roughly the same low performance. > > Using hdparm, I got a speedup of about 4x for /dev/.hda and 2x for > /dev/hdc, but /dev/hdd didn't change. > > When I installed my /dev/hdd disk, I had to disable it my BIOS > because it was too large (45GB). (The BIOS would hang when trying > to auto-detect it.) > > I notice that the kernel boot message include the lines: > > ide0: BM-DMA at 0xf000-0xf007, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA > ide1: BM-DMA at 0xf008-0xf00f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:pio > > Note how hdd says "pio" while all others say "DMA". > > I suspect that disabling the drive in the BIOS somehow caused Linux > to leave or put the disk in PIO-only mode, and I don't know what > to do to fix it. > > > MORE DETAILS: > > Using hdparm, I found that I was getting around 2 MB/s: > hda: ~2.2 MB/s > hdc: ~2.7 MB/s > hdd: ~2.1 MB/s > > When I enabled DMA mode ("hdparm -d1 ..."), hda quadrupled its speed > and hdc doubled its speed, but hdd changed only slightly: > hda: ~9.0 MB/s > hdc: ~5.5 MB/s > hdd: ~2.2 MB/s > > I tried several other hdparm options, but nothing seemed to make > much of a difference. > > When I looked at the kernel boot log messages, I notice that all the > ATA/IDE devices other than hdd were enabled for DMA mode, but hdd had > only PIO mode. Here are the seemingly relevant lines from dmesg: > > ALI15X3: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 78 > ALI15X3: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later > ide0: BM-DMA at 0xf000-0xf007, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA > ide1: BM-DMA at 0xf008-0xf00f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:pio > hda: Maxtor 90840D5, ATA DISK drive > hdb: TOSHIBA CD-ROM XM-6302B, ATAPI CDROM drive > hdc: Maxtor 91024U4, ATA DISK drive > hdd: Maxtor 54610H6, ATA DISK drive > ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14 > ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15 > hda: Maxtor 90840D5, 8047MB w/256kB Cache, CHS=1025/255/63 > hdc: Maxtor 91024U4, 9765MB w/2048kB Cache, CHS=19841/16/63 > hdd: Maxtor 54610H6, 43967MB w/2048kB Cache, CHS=5605/255/63 > hdb: ATAPI 32X CD-ROM drive, 256kB Cache > ... > Partition check: > hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4 < hda5 hda6 hda7 hda8 hda9 hda10 > > hdc: [PTBL] [1244/255/63] hdc1 hdc2 hdc3 hdc4 > hdd: hdd1 hdd2 > > > That "pio" vs. "DMA" difference for hdd correlates with the fact that > I disabled that disk in the BIOS. > > The BIOS would hang when auto-detecting the 45GB disk unless I disabled > the disk entirely or jumpered the disk to limit itself to 33GB. (The BIOS > would hang during auto-detection at boot time if the disk type was set to > "Auto". The BIOS would also hang in the BIOS setup screen for doing > auto-detection.) > > With the disk disabled in the BIOS, both Linux and Windows 98 seemed able > to access it fine. (I don't have any information on its performance under > Windows 98.) > > > Machine Details: > > Hardware: > Motherboard: GigaByte GA-5AX Rev. 3.0 > BIOS: Award Modular BIOS v4.51PG > GA-5AC REV 1.5 > 06/17/1999-ALADDIN5-2A5KKG09C-00 > Award Plug and Play BIOS Extension v1.0A > ATA/IDE controller: onboard controller (probably just ATA-33) > > CPU: AMD K6-2 300MHz (yeah, I know; quit laughing) > ATA devices: primary master: Maxtor 90840D5 - 8.4 GB, ATA-? > primary slave: Toshiba XM-6302B CD-ROM > secondary master: Maxtor 91024U4 - 10.2 GB, ATA-66 > secondary slave: Maxtor 54610H4 - 46 GB, ATA-100 > > (hdc and hdd are on what seems to be an 80-conductor > IDE ribbon cable) > > OS: > Debian potato > kernel-image-2.2.19 (version 2.2.19_4potato.5) > > > > Any ideas how to get Linux and my 45GB disk to use DMA mode (besides > upgrading my aging machine, of course)? > > > Thanks, > Daniel -- Simon Hepburn.