Re: biggest, newest IDE disk stuck in PIO mode; because no BIOS support? [dsb]
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.
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