On Monday August 11 2003 03:50 pm, John Richard Smith wrote:You see I found adding anything to /etc/sysconfig/harddisks made no difference,and while I assumed by default , that I gained nothing, so I went back to nothing here.
Tom,
Why does your previous example so much faster everything, what is it and how you configure that makes the difference ?
John
Well, I'm reading this thread and seein the suggestions to use hdparm parameters in rc.local or harddisks with some wonderment. With Mandrake 9.x, you shouldn't need to configure any hdparm parameters. Mandrake does it automatically unless it detects known problem hardware or configurations, even without hdparm being installed. IIRC this began with 8.2. Forcing hdparm parameters should be done with caution.
So your've confirmed what I felt.
It can easily lead to file system corruption. 'info hdparm' contains many warnings. So to answer your question, I didn't do anything, Mandrake did it. I just use quality hardware and ReiserFS 3.6.Yep. that's how Iunderstand it.
So my good hdparm -Tt numbers (T=650mb/s, t=47mb/s) are due to many factors, 9.2 current cooker and a Mandrake 2.4.22 kernel among them. Mandrake is installed on the second hda partition, just after the /swap partition. So both are on the fastest sections of the HDD platters. Probly 40% faster than the outer edges of the platters.
True for all HDD's, newest to the older ones, inspite of rpm speeds. Tho higher rpm drives will deliver better performance, there's still the drop off as you go out on the platters.
VP_IDE: VIA vt8235 (rev 00) IDE UDMA133 controller on pci00:11.1 ide0: BM-DMA at 0xdc00-0xdc07, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA ide1: BM-DMA at 0xdc08-0xdc0f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:DMA
That's a kt400a (pre-kt600) chipset runnin an overclocked XP 3000+ at 88 mhz higher than a 3200+ (176x13, 2288mhz). 512mb DDR400 ram runnin at DDR416 (416mhz) at CL2.5, 2-bank (a single 2-bank stick). Vcore, IO, and AGP voltages, I raised above normal (+.1v each). Two Maxtor 7200rpm, 2mb cache drives. One fairly new ata/133, one an older ata/100 (altho dmesg shows both setup as ata/133). No shared IRQ's,
4 hard drives , and 3 ide lines so how do you achieve seperate IRQ's or is that a daft question.
everything has it's own interrupt. To be honest, the overclock has very little or nothing to do with HDD performance, tho the PCI bus is at 35mhz.yes, I think I experienced this when we went through my own configuration with you a while back, and the conclusion I came to was that overdoing anything the makers recomend is a zero sum game to the degree to which you overclock, you get nothing for nothing, so I went back to makers recommended settings, and since I am not into gaming , blow it all.
that sums it up then
The system will clock even faster, but I don't want the PCI bus speeds getting too far off spec. That can actually hurt HDD and AGP video performance/stability. Both of which use the PCI bus. My Abit AGP nVidia GeF2 card doesn't even like 35mhz very much ;) So I set the aperature to 4MB and set it to agp=1x, effectively disabling sidebanding. I also don't use nvidia's closed source driver.
I particularly sought out a kt400a chipset board due to rave reviews, better performance than nforce2 chipsets. My one week experience with it certainly bears this out. Aopen AK77-400 Max/n (AMD approv'd). My old Sparkle 300w PSU (also AMD apprv'd) puts out extremely stable voltages, all a touch over spec. Rock steady voltages are very important to high system performance, HHD's included. Bottom line: I attribute my good HDD performance mostly to the PSU, chipset/motherboard, Maxtor 7200 rpm's, and Mandrake.
But those figures were very good Tom, well done we need someone to show us the way.
BTW, the numbers I posted were with X and dozens of processes runnin. As someone already correctly pointed out, hdparm -Tt needs to be run several times and an average taken. I posted my average numbers, actually some of my lower results. If you wanna cheat a little, boot to level 3, kill all unnecessary processes, then run hdparm -Tt. I'd rather have real world, as I use the system, numbers tho ;) OTOH, hdparm -Tt numbers have little to do with real world performance. FWIW, an I know this upsets some of y'all, you'll never see good performance with a store bought ready made system, or a laptop. If ya can't/won't do it yourself, find a good trustworthy system builder to do it for you. If ya havt'a have a laptop, you're just SOL ;>
Thanks.
John
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John Richard Smith
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