ATA133 hdparm errors? Is speed slow for ATA133?
 

ATA133 Maxtor, Linux 2.6.22

I read a post that used the command "hdparm" when I was searching LQ for an answer to how to solve the 33GB limit for the 80GB Maxtor drive, http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...apacity+maxtor

I get these errors for hdparm:

From http://tldp.org/HOWTO/SCSI-2.4-HOWTO/scsibus.html I read that ATA133 is supposed to get 133Mb/s I do not understand why the "hdparm -t" option only gives 22MB/s when ATA133 is supposed to get 133MB/s?

I don't think that url has what you are looking for, it seems to me that it's about speed, and its from 2000.
I think your bios has the 33GB limit.

Yes, since the switch over to the libata driver for SCSI/SATA/EIDE devices, hdparm doesn't work for a lot of things (they're working on it!)

The link between the drive is 133 MB/s. This does not mean that your drive can actually transfer at 133 MB/s from the platters to the IDE controller. If you had a drive that could do that kind of speed, you would have either an SSD or very fast server hard drive.

The link speed comes in handy when getting data from the drive's buffer which is much faster.

Thank you for the comment. I ran two timing tests for the harddrive, right after each other. They are different. The harddrive is a Maxtor 80G ATA133. Is it really that slow, max of 22MB/s? It is not missing drivers, and that is why it is slow?

edit: Timing O_DIRECT disk reads: 184 MB in 3.01 seconds = 61.04 MB/sec

I looked up your hard drive and it is 7200 RPM, (I think) longitude recording.

22.2 is slow.
if you are getting 61.04, that is very good.

(my old pentium III server gets 14 or so, and my laptop gets 45)

ATA133 Timing?
 

I did not get the RPM data for the Maxtor, because the errors from hdparm! From the link in the post question on LQ, the timing test data that they typically reported was not the "Timing O_DIRECT disk" values but the "Timing buffered disk reads" values. For the Timing buffered reads I get 22MB/s. I do not know what the difference between these times are.

How can I find out if there is some setting that I need to change to get ATA133 speed? For an ATA133 drive, what value should I be getting for:
Timing buffered disk reads: 66 MB in 3.04 seconds = 21.68 MB/sec ?

You are right! It came up when I searched for a solution in LQ. The Maxtor harddrive is from 2003, and that url has posts from 2006, before I posted to it!
Where did you find it? The Maxtor web www.maxtor.com did not have a search. I tried Google, and found people who use it, but nothing from Maxtor.

Maxtor is owned by Seagate now.
(All maxtor harddrives are also made by Seagate and are rebranded).
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.js...eqPage=Support

I don't know the difference.

How did you get Timing O_DIRECT disk?

There is nothing in particular you need to do in order to get ATA133 speed. There is no ATA133 3.5" hard drive which comes even vaguely close to the limits. (There are some really fast SCSI and SATA drives, but none of them came in ATA133 versions.)

As for what numbers you should be getting--neither 66MB and 3 seconds are really big/long enough for an accurate test. Try something more like 30 seconds for a proper sustained rate test.

That said, 22 megabytes per second does sound slow, unless your hard drive is a bit old. Speeds of 30-40 megabytes per second would be more typical for an 80gig 3.5" hard drive. One thing which can affect speed is whether or not DMA is turned on. Probably, it's turned on though; it would be turned on by default.