OK, I've been fighting with this one for too long time by myself now.
Thougt I get rid of it with hardware upgrade.

Nope.

Problem:

Check out the speed of /dev/hdd.

-No help by hdparm settings
-No help by changing hard drives or motherboard (even mb-type from nf2 > via)
-No help by changing distros
-No help by changing positions between hard drives
-No help by aiming my fileserver with TWO shotguns and cursing its mother to be micro$oftian slut

###################

Linux Voimalaitos 2.6.12-2-686 #1 Wed Jun 22 16:29:50 UTC 2005
One AMD Unknown 899MHz processor, 1777.66 total bogomips, 511M RAM
System library 2.3.5

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 504 238 265 0 35 165
Swap: 488 0 488
Total: 992 238 753

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 4.7G 1.7G 3.0G 36% /
/dev/hda2 70G 57G 14G 81% /drives/hda
/dev/hdb1 75G 31G 45G 41% /drives/hdb
/dev/hdc1 115G 114G 1.4G 99% /drives/hdc
/dev/hdd1 76G 58G 19G 76% /drives/hdd

/dev/hda: SAMSUNG SV8004H: 36°C
/dev/hdb: WDC WD800BB-60JKA0: 44°C
/dev/hdc: Maxtor 6Y120L0: 52°C
/dev/hdd: Maxtor 6Y080L0: 47°C

/dev/hda:
Timing cached reads: 860 MB in 2.01 seconds = 428.57 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 96 MB in 3.04 seconds = 31.54 MB/sec

/dev/hdb:
Timing cached reads: 896 MB in 2.00 seconds = 447.84 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 160 MB in 3.04 seconds = 52.57 MB/sec

/dev/hdc:
Timing cached reads: 848 MB in 2.00 seconds = 423.01 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 166 MB in 3.01 seconds = 55.18 MB/sec

/dev/hdd:
Timing cached reads: 860 MB in 2.00 seconds = 429.21 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 10 MB in 3.46 seconds = 2.89 MB/sec

##############

Does any geek have an solution? I'd offer a virtual beer...

The first thing I noticed that doesn't seem right is this:

but apparrently you've switched the drives around a lot but whatever is on hdd is always slow. Nonetheless, having a drive at 99% capacity can cause problems and hdd is on the same ide channel as the nearly full drive.

However, given all your "no help" statements, one would have to suspect a hardware problem. Check your cables and jumpering for starters. If you have the drives jumpered "cable select" try explicitly jumpering master/slave instead. If you have another ide cable around try swapping out the hdc/hdd cable.

Do you mean that:

A) the same drive is slow in any position
Have you tried actually removing the slow hard drive and trying it in a totally different computer?

B) the secondary slave is always slow
I have no ideas, except changing the motherboard/cables/(power supply?)

OK, I forgot to metion that I've changed ide-cables too.

I can also take two new drives an throw them like:

/dev/hda --> drive one
/dev/hdb --> none
/dev/hdc --> none
/dev/hdd --> drive two

Both drives out of the box and both drives are jumpered to Master/Slave properly.

I can swap my drives round'n'again but mystery of slow /dev/hdd remains.

So it's not single HD not working. It's just secondary slave not working.

I even installed M$ server 2003 (purely on desperation) to find out that in the gatesworld the performance is ideal (~50MB/sec) so it should be software issue.

Have you tried different kernel series (2.0, 2.2, 2.4, 2.6)?
How can you have a secondary slave without a secondary master?

2.4 & 2.6

Can't see why not:

On that scenario my box just shows it next in the line (as /dev/hdb).

For instance (is that english anymore?) in my mainrig i have LG's DVD-drive as slave without master 'cause I'm waiting for my new DVD-RW to come and fill the master-slot.

Works well with both WIN XP and GENTOO.

I've done some research, and you're right.

Have you tried switching the drive positions on the connector:
Also, have a look at: http://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/piper...ch/001405.html
according to this, dma is not enabled. What chipset do you have?