Saturday, May 18, 2002

Disk Problem Solved -- 5:47 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

After playing around with the hdparm command in Linux, I discovered why I was having so much trouble with disk access on my Red Hat drive. It was not enabling DMA transfers. My transfer rates (as reported by hdparm) shot from 3.8M/sec to 31.5M/sec. It's still well under the theoretical maximum, but it is lightyears better. To activate the changes, I uncommented the following lines in /etc/sysconfig/harddisks:

USE_DMA=1
MULTIPLE_IO=16
EIDE_32BIT=3

If your distribution doesn't use the above file, add the following line to rc.local:

hdparm -d1 -m16 -c3 /dev/xxx

Replace the xxx with the drive's device name. Mine is the slave on the first IDE channel so it is hdb. Just be careful. The hdparm command can also wreck your drive. Check out the O'Reilly Network article on it for more information.

News for 05/18/2002

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