I recently got a (very old) SCSI hd for testing purpose. Wanna see what scsi can do. The hd is a Seagate ST32171N 2GB. The user manual show me an impressive rpm rate (7200 rpm) and a good access time. My SCSI adapter is an (very old too) AHA 1542 isa 10MB/sec

I tested it with hdparm but strangely result are 4 time worst than my Ide hd of the same size. I always tought SCSI was better and faster, so these results (see below) are really surprising to me. But maybe I need to enable something? Any tips for me?


hdparm -t /dev/sda1
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 51.45 seconds = 1.24 MB/sec


hdparm -t /dev/hda1
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 13.25 seconds = 4.83 MB/sec

I think that hdparm only works on ide drives, seems to say so in man hdparm. But one would think that using hdparm on scsi devices would cause errors.

I do know that on an IDE drive, changing DMA to 32bit yeilds the greatest performance boost.

Heh.. The 1542 is at least _SEVEN_ years old. Big surprise it's not as fast as modern day IDE drives. Heck, it's probably not as fast as 3 year old IDE drives, they've supported speeds faster than it's maximum transfer rate for at least that long. Try a nice 15K RPM Seagate Cheetah drive on an U160 or U320 controller then we'll talk