Problem with file transfer and SATA
 

Hi,

I asked this question in the MepisLovers forum and so far I haven't gotten an answer so I'm hoping someone here could help.

The problem is that I can't transfer big files (say 600MB) from my NTFS partition to my Ext3 Home partition without it stalling and freezing. I installed Mepis with the 2.6 kernel so SATA support shouldn't be an issue for an NForce2 MB but that's what it appears to be (both partitions are on the same SATA drive)

I ran this test:

karl@1[~]$ hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 1640 MB in 2.00 seconds = 818.08 MB/sec
BLKFLSBUF failed: Permission denied
HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(null) (wait for flush complete) failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
Timing buffered disk reads: 46 MB in 3.05 seconds = 15.09 MB/sec
BLKFLSBUF failed: Permission denied
HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(null) (wait for flush complete) failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device

The timed cache speed is slow and the timed buffered read is ridiculously slow.
The other thing is the error messages which I have no idea what they mean

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!!!!

The HDIO_DRIVE_CMD error seems to be given by most (all?) testing on a SATA device. I believe the BLKFLSBUF error is due to you not being root. Try re-running the test as root.

Yaaa..I fixed it myself!

I also learned that the output of hdparm for SATA isn't very accurate.

So if anyone else has a this same problem all you have to do is this:

Go into your root partition and change this in etc/fstab:

From:
/dev/sda3 / ext3 defaults,noatime 1 1

To this:
/dev/sda3 / ext3 defaults,noatime 0 0

Reboot, problem solved.

I can't imagine why the pass/dump values would change that.

But anyway, why do you think the output of hdparm for SATA is inaccurate?

From reading this post:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/290393