While testing network transfer speeds I suddenly noticed that the hard drive in my computer seems to be really slow.
Code:
$ hdparm -t /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 10 MB in 3.05 seconds = 3.27 MB/sec
I figured that couldn't be normal. The hard disk is a WD 120 GB from 2003. I connected an old hard disk (WD 60 GB from 2001) via USB and got the following results:
Code:
hdparm -t /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 60 MB in 3.09 seconds = 19.43 MB/sec
And I figured if a USB hard drive is six times faster than an IDE drive, something's awfully wrong (on my laptop I get 40 MB/s).
Before I go about replacing the hard drive, I wanna know for sure that it's really broken. I don't think it has to do with the current configuration though. I haven't had Windows running on the computer for four years, and I don't remember if the disk's performance was ever any better. Long before my last Linux installation, I noticed that burning was really slow, but I always connected this with the newly bought burner (old one was two times faster though it should have been four times slower). Now I think this might have been the slow hard drive all along.
Strangely, writing is a lot faster than reading. I get up to 9 MB/s when writing to the disk (though this is still really slow compared to other disks). But due to the slow reading, it sometimes takes half an hour to copy 1 GiB of data.
So all I wanna is... can this be caused by using wrong drivers or something? Or is this definitely the fault of the hard drive? I don't really feel like buying another PATA HD...
Or would it help opening the computer and checking the cables? Like if they're tightly enough connected or something?
