On Thursday 21 June 2001 02:15 pm, Franki wrote: > Hi all, > > Is there any problems switching my 7200RPM ATA100 with Mdk 7.2 and > reiserFS??? While I've been using ReiserFS 24/7 for almost a year now with no problems, and many benefits I'd swear by .... it's still a beta FS. You need to thoroughly investigate the pros & cons and make your own decision. I use it on an old 5400rpm/256k WD slave with a 250mb /swap and the rest of the 8 gigs all in one big / partition. > Abit KT7a (capable of ata100) with bios dated this month.. > Linux Details. > ReiserFS. > Kernel 2.2.19-4MDKsecure > all updates except kde loaded. > Can anyone make any suggestions as to what my settings should be for > maximum speed? > > It currently tests at: > > Buffer cache: 125.49 MB/sec > Buffered: 29.91 MB/sec Civileme's already given you the best advice along the lines I mentioned in a prior post. There's VIA/mobo(specially **Abit KT7a)/HDD (specially ***WD) issues, any OS. You seem to have gathered together the hardware that's most susceptiple. **Research why AMD dropped Abit's and particularly KT133a chipset models (KT7a with/without raid) from their recommended mobo list last February. Only the Biostar M7VKD and Soyo K7VTA Pro KT133a boards still remain. *** Civileme seems to imply all WD HDD's are affected, I've only heard/read that some, mostly newer models were. Still, I'd trust anything Civileme tells you. > > > I was getting 22mb buffered, with my BX chipset and an old Quantum > 4.3gig... > > 22 up to 29.91 doesn't seem like that much of an impovement... > > Especially since I have a ATA drive and motherboard connected with > the ATA100 cable, An 80 wire cable is nothing more than a good'ol ata/33 40 wire cable with the other 40 wires doin nothin more than separating the real 40 wires to reduce inductance. Count the pins on the connector ;>> Maybe I'm infering too much, but you seem to be enamored with ata/100. Fact is, all HDD's whether they're ata/33, /66, or /100 still run on the motherboard's 33.3mhz IDE bus. The ata/66 and /100 are enhancements that don't, as their nomeclature implies, double or more than double thu-put, or as many seem to believe, bus speed. What improvement they may provide also comes at a price of risk and problems. IMO, more than they're worth. Also, like AGP 1x,2x,and 4x, the enhancement comes at the price of draining off other system resources, namely cpu/cache/ram. There's no free lunch. If you're getting 30mb/sec, be happy. Be aware tho that that's a benchmark rate, real world transfer rates are much less. I doubt that with a stopwatch you could tell much difference tranferring a huge amount of files, whether the HDD hparmed at 20mb/sec, or 30mb/sec. > The drive is a 7200RPM model and I believe it has a 2mb internal > cache... (I do think the buffer cache speed is far better then it > was.) The drive is the only ide device on the primary ide interface. 'hdparm -i /dev/hd?' will tell you the buffer (cache size). It'll be a little less than 2mb (2048k). The HDD's firmware uses the missing k's. IMNSHO, higher rpm and bigger buffer HDD's are a much better idea than the current fads of ata/100 and software-firmware raid kludges like Abit's. An IBM 7200/2mb HDD would'a been a better choice tho ;> ...and a Soyo K7VTA Pro ;~>> YMMV -- Tom Brinkman [EMAIL PROTECTED] Galveston Bay