Hard Drives

Rodney Kanno pepe65 at hawaii.rr.com
Mon Sep 10 09:53:03 PDT 2001


I see..interesting....I tchecked to see if DMA is on and it is, but my hard 
drive is nowhere near as quick as your example. I guess cause its an old 
drive?

[root at localhost happy]# hdparm -t /dev/hda
 
/dev/hda:
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in 11.31 seconds =  5.66 MB/sec

Thanks,
Rodney


On Monday 10 September 2001 04:40 pm, you wrote:
> The speed difference is mainly noticable if the drive is used often, like
> for the operating system or swap.  I wouldn't worry so much about speed if
> it were storage... but maybe not mass storage for large multimedia stuff.
>
> Either way, be sure that DMA is enabled in IDE, and use the highest level
> of UDMA supported by your IDE controller and IDE cable.
> UDMA 3 = Ultra DMA 33   <--- 40 pin cable
> UDMA 4 = Ultra DMA 66   <--- 80 pin cable
> UDMA 5 = Ultra DMA 100 <--- 80 pin cable
>
> [root at computer /root]# hdparm -d /dev/hda
>
> /dev/hda:
>  using_dma    =  1 (on)
>
> [root at computer /root]# hdparm -t /dev/hda
>
> /dev/hda:
>  Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in 2.70 seconds =  23.68 MB/sec
>
> Be careful though, because DMA can destroy data or hard drives with some
> flaky controllers, older kernels and a few flaky Western Digital hard
> drives.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Rodney Kanno" <pepe65 at hawaii.rr.com>
> To: "Linux & Unix Advocates & Users" <luau at list.luau.hi.net>
> Sent: Monday, September 10, 2001 4:18 AM
> Subject: [luau] Hard Drives
>
> > Is there a noticable difference in speed between a 5400 rpm and a 7200
> > rpm hard drive?
>
> ---
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