Svante Signell wrote:
Hi, -SNIP- < However, with DMA off the speed is very low: hdparm -d 0 /dev/hda /dev/hda: Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 15.26 seconds = 4.19 MB/sec
I got just about the same answer(s) on my machines when I ran hdparm on them. ALL of the machines were defaulting to DMA off. This all started when a visiting "guru" complained about the slow FTP transfers over my home LAN. Upon investigation, I found the HD I/O on the various machines was capping the max transer rate of large files (330 Mbyts or so) to about 14% (14 Mbs)of the rated capacity (100 Mbs) of the network between any two machines! Turning DMA on on all machines rasied this value dramatically to around 50% of the rated capacity between any two machines!
> -SNIP-<
BTW: Is there a good place to put in the hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda somewhere at the boot scripts? I've added it to the /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh script. It would be very nice to have this as default without making any manual changes, but I assume there are reasons why not.
There is a Debian package called "hwtools" that creates a nice initscript located in /etc/init.d/ that is called during bootup. There is a place to place this command in there. I just discovered this and implimented it here. It works like a charm! You get a few other "tools" in the process, most of which I havn't used yet.
Cheers, -Don Spoon-