Test Hard Drive performance?
I had a heck of a time trying to install SuSE 9.3 on my laptop... because suse would refuse to detect/recognize my main hard drive... and eventually someone suggested I try installing with: insmod=ide-generic ... which worked like a charm..
However, I have suspected that because of this 'generic' IDE driver I might not be getting the best performance out of my SuSE install... is there a way of testing the read/write speeds of the hard drive in comparison to what it should be? Should I even be worrying about this? It just doesn't seem to be performing to the level I'm used to in windows... Any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance, |
no promises that this won't blow your hard drive up, but I run
#/sbin/hdparm -u 1 -d 1 /dev/hda in one of my init.d scripts to turn on dma and irq. you can test the speed of your drive on a direct read with /sbin/hdparm -t /dev/hdx (where x is the drive, usually a if it's the master on the primary IDE) I wouldn't fret about using a generic IDE driver. the reason IDE is a standard is to avoid having a driver for each different model. If your drive wasn't fully compatible with a generic IDE driver, you wouldn't have been able to force an IDE plug into it. /g |
Is there a way to check to see if DMA and IRQ are already enabled?
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hdparm /dev/hda
You can see DMA status in the 'using_dma' line hdparm -i /dev/hda More detailed information including an indication of the particular DMA mode in use (highlighted with *) if DMA is enabled. cat /proc/interrupts IRQ list. Typically the primary IDE controller uses 14 and a secondary controller uses 15. Each IDE controller requires an IRQ to function. No IRQ, no drive access. hubcapboy did not 'turn on irq' with that command. |
This is the output from the command hdparm -i /dev/hda
Code:
Model=HITACHI_DK23FB-40, FwRev=00M1A0A1, SerialNo=19N409 Async DMA: MultiWord DMA-2 Ultra DMA: Ultra DMA-5 Does this mean I'm not getting the best performance out of my hard drive? how can I make sure linux takes advantage of UDMA5? |
Since that drive has a maximum media transfer rate of 50.2 MB/sec (for the two platter model) or 45.5 MB/sec (for the single platter), you may be limited by udma2 33 MB/sec operation although in the real world I'd be surprised if you notice any improvement using udma5.
http://www.netcomdirect.com/hitrdk40at292.html Run a benchmark to establish your udma2 transfer rates hdparm -t /dev/hda Try setting udma5 mode (WARNING: MAY CAUSE DATA CORRUPTION - HAVE A BACKUP OR BE PREPARED TO REINSTALL) hdparm -d1 -X udma5 /dev/hda If no error, run another benchmark to check the difference. hdparm -t /dev/hda Also possibly worth trying is the hdparm -u 1 switch which sets the interrupt-unmask flag. -u Get/set interrupt-unmask flag for the drive. A setting of 1 permits the driver to unmask other interrupts during processing of a disk interrupt, which greatly improves Linux's responsive- ness and eliminates "serial port overrun" errors. Use this fea- ture with caution: some drive/controller combinations do not tolerate the increased I/O latencies possible when this feature is enabled, resulting in massive filesystem corruption. In par- ticular, CMD-640B and RZ1000 (E)IDE interfaces can be unreliable (due to a hardware flaw) when this option is used with kernel versions earlier than 2.0.13. Disabling the IDE prefetch fea- ture of these interfaces (usually a BIOS/CMOS setting) provides a safe fix for the problem for use with earlier kernels. |
Thank you very much for your help :)
I was able to successfully change to UDMA mode 5 without any errors and test the hard drive.. and you were right, there really isn't any difference in transfer speed :) Now if linux defaulted to UDMA2, would it be safer to use UDMA2 if UDMA5 did not appear to offer any increase transfer speed? |
I think it may be your BIOS that defaulted to udma2. If it runs udma5 in Windows, it may be a Windows driver bumping it to udma5 during boot.
http://ldp.nllgg.nl/HOWTO/Ultra-DMA-8.html#ss8.1 I doubt you'll have any problems running udma5 in Linux. You could append the hdparm command to /etc/rc.d/rc.local to switch it during boot. 5400 rpm drives are never particularly fast though. You might consider fitting a 7200 rpm drive although it will use more power and probably run hotter and noisier. The Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 60GB (for instance) has a maximum media transfer rate of 70.1 MB/sec if your laptop has an ATA-66 or ATA-100 controller to handle the pace. (Edit: Since udma2, 4, and 5, are ATA-33, ATA-66, and ATA-100, respectively, your laptop does indeed have an ATA-100 controller.) |
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