LinuxQuestions.org - slow disk in fedora 6 / hda sda detection issue

- Linux - Hardware (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-hardware-18/)

- - slow disk in fedora 6 / hda sda detection issue (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-hardware-18/slow-disk-in-fedora-6-hda-sda-detection-issue-582891/)

slow disk in fedora 6 / hda sda detection issue

Please would anybody be able to help me improve the performance of a fedora 6 HP DL140 server...

I'm having serious issues with its disk speed, which is causing a huge bottleneck on the network.

Quote:

# hdparm -t /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 12 MB in 3.59 seconds = 3.34 MB/sec

After reading in some forums, I attempted to set DMA to 1 for this disk hoping that it might improve the situation, though I receive the following error:

Quote:

# hdparm -d1 /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted
using_dma = 0 (off)

Q. Is there any way in Fedora 6 that I can enable this feature?
Ideally I'm looking for a modprobe line, or something which I can at least test from the command line, as I'm working on this machine remotely and have no kvm access.

To add to my confusion, the output of hdparm -i /dev/hda reveals Model=ST3808110AS

Google confirmed my suspicion that this model is fact a SATA drive:
Seagate Baracuda 7200.9 80GB 7.2K SATA Hard Drive

As far as I understood linux will identify sata drives as sda rather than hda, though unfortunately as the server is now racked I cant just open it up and take a look at whether it is actually using SATA or IDE.

So I am wondering whether this issue is deeper than simply that DMA needs to be enabled - is it possible that fedora could be mistaking the SATA drive for an IDE drive?

Here is some output from /var/log/messages on startup:

Quote:

Sep 6 12:39:18 cherry kernel: Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 7.00alpha2
Sep 6 12:39:18 cherry kernel: ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
Sep 6 12:39:18 cherry kernel: hda: ST3808110AS, ATA DISK drive
Sep 6 12:39:18 cherry kernel: ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
Sep 6 12:39:18 cherry kernel: hda: max request size: 512KiB
Sep 6 12:39:18 cherry kernel: hda: 156301488 sectors (80026 MB) w/8192KiB Cache, CHS=16383/255/63
Sep 6 12:39:18 cherry kernel: hda: cache flushes supported
Sep 6 12:39:18 cherry kernel: hda: hda1 hda2 hda3

And some other specs which may be helpful:

Machine hardware: HP ProLiant DL140 G3
# uname -r: 2.6.22.2-42.fc6

lspci shows:

Quote:

00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 631xESB/632xESB/3100 Chipset SATA Storage Controller IDE (rev 09)

If anybody has any ideas please let me know as I need to get this fixed asap and am already starting to lose sleep over it!

Thank you!

Seagate SATA hard drives are known to have problems enabling DMA in Linux because of hard drive and controller conflict. I suggest change the hard drive with a different brand. Though you can try to add hda=dma to the bootloader and/or add noapic to the line.

I suggest Western Digital 'Raptor' 72 GB will be a good and reliable replacement.

Intel can change its SATA connections to emulate like a PATA to ease installing operating systems like Linux.

Try installing lshw to get a list of hardware that is in the server.

Thanks Electro.

lshw seems to reveal that the disk is using the ata_piix driver...

Quote:

*-ide
description: IDE interface
product: 631xESB/632xESB/3100 Chipset SATA Storage Controller IDE
vendor: Intel Corporation
physical id: 1f.2
bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.2
version: 09
width: 32 bits
clock: 66MHz
capabilities: ide pm bus_master cap_list
configuration: driver=ata_piix latency=0 module=ata_piix

*-ide
description: IDE Channel 0
physical id: 0
bus info: ide@0
logical name: ide0
*-disk
description: ATA Disk
product: ST3808110AS
vendor: Seagate
physical id: 0
bus info: ide@0.0
logical name: /dev/hda
version: 3.AJJ
serial: 5LRBZ302
size: 74GB
capacity: 74GB
capabilities: ata dma lba iordy smart pm partitioned partitioned:dos
configuration: smart=on
*-volume:0
description: Linux filesystem partition
physical id: 1
bus info: ide@0.0,1
logical name: /dev/hda1
capacity: 196MB
capabilities: primary bootable
*-volume:1
description: Linux swap / Solaris partition
physical id: 2
bus info: ide@0.0,2
logical name: /dev/hda2
capacity: 2000MB
capabilities: primary nofs
*-volume:2
description: Linux filesystem partition
physical id: 3
bus info: ide@0.0,3
logical name: /dev/hda3
capacity: 72GB
capabilities: primary

... which baffles me as I had come to the conclusion that it was using the generic ide driver and that if I added hda=noprobe and hda=none into grub.conf it would switch to the ata_piix driver, appear as sda, and fix the problem.

Here's some text I found whilst looking around on the subject:

Quote:

In recent Linux kernels, there are two modules capable of handling the ICH6 disk controller:

* ata_piix: the disk shows as /dev/sda and DMA is enabled.
* Generic IDE driver (ide-disk): the disk shows as /dev/hda and DMA is disabled.

The simplest way to enable DMA is to force the IDE driver to ignore the system hard disk by passing the hda=noprobe and hda=none kernel argument. The driver will then be handled by the ata_piix driver. Note that this will change its device name to /dev/sda (which may require changes in /etc/fstab and the boot loader) and may cause other problems as listed above.

I have also been discussing this here:
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showth...286#post861286

When you say..
"Intel can change its SATA connections to emulate like a PATA to ease installing operating systems like Linux."

.. is this what you think is happening in this case - why it's showing as hda instead of sda, or are you suggesting that there is something i can do?

If you are able to shed any light on what's going on here I would appreciate it! thanks for your help.