poor performance on ata (native sata board)

I own a sata system that has the option to plug two normal ata devices in (one on each cable) for old cd-roms etc. Recently I bought an ata dvd-burner. I was surprised to find that it burned no faster than the old cd-rom that was in it's place read. I plugged a harddrive in it's slot and bang, it still had a maximum throughput of 2.5 - 3.0 MBps.

My other sata discs have a throughput of 48 - 56 MBps (i see that much in gkrellm) but this... Total faliure.

Could this be fixed?

The numbers you quote are typical for a hard drive with DMA turned off. Try 'hdparm /dev/hda' (maybe as root, if that's your drive) and check for 'using_dma = 1' in the output.

You can turn on DMA with 'hdparm -d1 /dev/hda'.

There is a kernel compile flag to force DMA usage. Sometimes you also need a kernel module for your particular chipset before DMA will work.

/dev/hda:
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq = 0 (off)
using_dma = 0 (off)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
HDIO_GETGEO failed: Invalid argument

ok.. this has got to be bad

I'll see what kernel flags are availible.

Thanks!

/dev/hda:
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted
using_dma = 0 (off)


This is even worse...

The system is quite new, the kernel should have a module.

I'll keep everyone posted

human genome project/dev/hda:
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq = 0 (off)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
HDIO_GETGEO failed: Invalid argument


Ok, so this looks more like it...


However, the drive still behaves porely, because burning software only recognises it's speed for like 2x instead of 16x. Any relation to HDIO_GETGEO failed?

I just figured it might be the media, but do you even get 2x DVD-R's nowadays?

Sorry, haven't seen that 'HDIO_GETGEO failed: Invalid argument' message before. If you google the whole message you will gets lots of hits, many related to DVD drives.