ext2/ext3/vfat on laptop vs. desktop
Dear people,
another not-quite-laptop-related-but-only-happens-here story:
After I switched to ext3 on my installation partition (Acer TM 803, Debian
stable/testing, based on Knoppix 3.2, heavily upgraded) I noticed a severe
performance loss. Actually, the system suddenly felt quite sluggish
(especially during start-up). I did some hdparm -t runs and discoverd that
the transfer rate had dropped to around 12.9 MB/s from around 20 MB/s.
That is a 30 % drop! I cross-checked with my desktop installation
(basically the same setup, but of course very different hardware) and I
only noticed (if at all) a drop in transfer rate of about 1 or 2 percent
between ext3 and ext2. Also, the vfat partition on the laptop delivers the
good old 20 MB/s as did the ext2 partition. On the desktop there is also
only a small difference between vfat and ext3.
Any ideas why this happened? And yes, I have enabled DMA and manually
switched to UDMA 5 on all concerned drives.
Should I go back to ext2?
Cheers, Stefan (debian @ goessling . de)
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