LinuxQuestions.org - UDMA2 instead of UDMA5 on harddisk with suse9.3

hi folks,

I was searching the forum for hours but found no really good advice what to do concerning the following question
(perhaps I am wrong and everything is fine):

I am running Suse9.3 kernel 2.6.11.4-21.10 with kde 3.5.0 and Qt3.3.5 on an ACER Travelmate 4601WLMi. I have a dual-boot WinXP Pro and Suse9.3 on /dev/hda. Up to now everything worked fine except the fact that it is very slow; especially openoffice, kontact and others take minutes to load but also other applications. after a few tests I recognized that my harddisk was not running with dma. after setting the harddisk (and also the cdrom) to dma via "Yast2/Hardware/IDE DMA-Modus" I recognized improved performance. But checking the settings again told me (in YAST2) that my harddisk is running with ultraDMA/33 and no DMA on the CDROM. Surprisingly YAST tells me that the required modus for the harddisk is ultraDMA/100. but is does not change it.

Then I checked the var/log/boot.msg and it tells me the following:

Setting up IDE DMA mode

/dev/hda:
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
setting xfermode to 69 (UltraDMA mode5)
using_dma = 1 (on)

/dev/hdb:
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
using_dma = 1 (on)
done

This sounds strange for me since also hdparm tells me this:

hdparm -i /dev/hda

/dev/hda:

Model=IC25N060ATMR04-0, FwRev=MO3OAD4A, SerialNo=MRG359KCJ6T65H
Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec Fixed DTR>10Mbs }
RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=4
BuffType=DualPortCache, BuffSize=7884kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16
CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=117210240
IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:240,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
PIO modes: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 *udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5
AdvancedPM=yes: mode=0x80 (128) WriteCache=enabled
Drive conforms to: ATA/ATAPI-6 T13 1410D revision 3a:

* signifies the current active mode

This tells me that my harddisk is running with UDMA2. This sounds all really strange for me. Another thing is the output of the hdparm -tT, which follows:

hdparm -tT /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
Timing cached reads: 2880 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1440.22 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 3.02 seconds = 21.21 MB/sec

This sounds for me very good although I do not have really knowledge about these numbers, but searching in google shows me equivalent numbers for other people running their harddisks under UDMA5.

My harddrive is a IC25N060ATMR0-4, the driver is piix_ide as far as I know.

Does anyone has an idea what to do, to drive the disk with UDMA5? changing the mode with hdparm has no effect.

please tell me if you need any further output of my system.