Hard drive performance

rickbb · 09-06-2000, 01:03 PM

Tried the command and got reply that "hdparm command not found"

jeremy · 09-06-2000, 01:19 PM

The directory /sbin is probably not in your path. Try typing

Code:

/sbin/hdparm -t /dev/harddrive

rickbb · 09-06-2000, 01:39 PM

Tried that and changing to the /sbin directory. Still get the command not message. I do a ls and the file is listed and highlighted but will not run.?

Could this be due to my other problem of not being able to log on the linux machine? I'm running from a win box with a term program with SSH.

bickford · 09-06-2000, 02:36 PM

If yer within the /sbin directory type ./hdparm and see what happens. That or just type PATH=$PATH:/sbin/ then type EXPORT PATH which will put /sbin in your path so hopefully you'll be able to run it.

rickbb · 09-06-2000, 02:47 PM

That worked.

/dev/hda1:
Timing buffered disk reads: 32 MB in 7.64 seconds = 4.19 MB/sec

It's a Compaq deskpro P2 400mhz IDE drive type and speed is unknown.

keef2 · 09-13-2000, 10:11 PM

Strange. results !!!

P3 Laptop 300 Mhz + 12 GB Drive

Using redhat 6.2

64 MB is 15.46 seconds = 4.14 MB/sec ?

Using Gentus 3.0 (ABIT)

64 MB in 4.76 seconds = 13.45 MB/sec

10.7 Seconds and a 9.31 MB/sec difference !!!

jeremy · 09-14-2000, 01:43 AM

Gentus does have UDMA/66 support, but I don't think that would cause such a large discrepancy. It could be that something it configured differently in the Red Hat install.

bickford · 10-01-2000, 07:43 PM

jeremy,
Well, I finally got Linux to recognize my SCSI controller/hard drive as Ultra2 SCSI, but my hdparm results haven't improved much at all.

(scsi0:0:0:0) Synchronous at 80.0 Mbyte/sec, offset 15.

Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 4.96 seconds = 13.90 MB/sec

I've been all over my BIOS and there's nothing left to configure in there. Was there anything you did to the actual drivers to get your MB/sec up over 20? Thanks!

jeremy · 10-01-2000, 08:25 PM

A have a few questions for you.

1) What driver are you using?
2) Do you have any non-Ultra2 devices on the chain?

bickford · 10-01-2000, 11:00 PM

I have a few answers for you:

1) I'm using the aic7xxx driver that comes with RedHat6.2 version 5.1.28/3.2.4 (ripped from dmesg). It's running as a module.

2) I don't have any other non-Ultra2 on the chain... Well OK I do, but I removed them and didn't get any increase in performance. In other words I removed all my SCSI devices, save the hard drive, and then ran the latest hdparm test that I put in my previous post.

jeremy · 10-01-2000, 11:27 PM

You may want to try the latest driver, which is 5.1.31. The person who wrote the driver actually works for Red Hat now. The driver is available here - http://people.redhat.com/dledford/aic7xxx.html

jeremy · 10-08-2000, 06:10 PM

Here is a great tip for those of you with IDE drives. I just benchmarked my laptop and got the following

Quote:

64 MB in 20.04 seconds = 3.19 MB/sec

Now I know that laptops usually ship with pretty slow drives, but I have a fairly nice laptop and this seemed too low. I checked the settings on the hard drive and noticed 2 things.
1)The drive wasn't using 32-bit I/O and 2) The drive was not using DMA. If this is also the case for you type

Code:

hdparm -c 1 -d 1 -k 1 /dev/hda

My results after this simple change?

Quote:

64 MB in 6.53 seconds = 9.80 MB/sec

Over a 300% speed increase! You will need to put the hdparm line in your startup scripts if you don't want to type it after every reboot.

vansouza · 10-17-2000, 09:26 PM

Open a term window and type hdparm -c 1 -d 1 -k 1 /dev/hda
and watch the speed increase... that is unless your install got the drives correct to begin with... Let me know if you need to have this happen with every reboot... cause that will clear it...

bako · 11-07-2000, 08:52 AM

/dev/sda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 2.20 seconds = 29.09 MB/sec

coming from "my" new server, sda is a mirrored container of two 9GB Ultra-3 (U160) 10K SCSI disks in RAID-1 trough a Dell PERC 2/Si Ultra-2 raid controller.

bako · 11-17-2000, 05:18 AM

Okay, issuing the hdparm command to set DMA and 32-bit IO worked, but after a reboot the settings are gone again.
So I tried creating a script in /etc/rc.d/init.d it contains:

Code:

#!/bin/sh

# Speed up harddisk by issuing hdparm commands

echo "Speed up harddisk" 
/sbin/hdparm -c 1 -d 1 -k 1 /dev/hda

and I symlinked it into the rc1.d, rc2.d, rc3.d, rc4.d and rc5.d dirs with the name K01hdspeedup (so it would start before all the other scripts)

But after rebooting it didn't work at all

What am I doing wrong???