I'm puzzled. A few days ago I installed a new Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 40 GB
hard drive on my system, replacing a fairly old 1 gig drive. I installed it
as slave to my existing 8 gig drive, which holds Debian. I intended to use
it for data (video files, etc.). I created a swap partition (128 MB) and a
20 gig ext2 partition, leaving the rest of the drive unused for later.

Since booting with this setup, my system has been dramatically *slower* than
before, particularly when reading from and/or writing to the new drive.
Even things that I wouldn't expect to depend on drive speed, like redrawing
of graphical elements in X, are something like four times slower than
before.

Does anyone have a suggestion on why this would happen? Or where I can find
more information?

Thanks.
--
Carl Fink carl@fink.to
Jabootu's Minister of Proofreading
http://www.jabootu.com


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On Sun, Jul 06, 2003 at 09:59:24PM -0400, Carl Fink wrote:
> I'm puzzled. A few days ago I installed a new Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 40 GB
> hard drive on my system, replacing a fairly old 1 gig drive. I installed it
> as slave to my existing 8 gig drive, which holds Debian. I intended to use
> it for data (video files, etc.). I created a swap partition (128 MB) and a
> 20 gig ext2 partition, leaving the rest of the drive unused for later.
>
> Since booting with this setup, my system has been dramatically *slower* than
> before, particularly when reading from and/or writing to the new drive.
> Even things that I wouldn't expect to depend on drive speed, like redrawing
> of graphical elements in X, are something like four times slower than
> before.
>
> Does anyone have a suggestion on why this would happen? Or where I can find
> more information?

You probably are aware of this but if not, you might need to enable DMA
manually for the disk. This can be done with the hdparm program.

hdparm -d1
to enable DMA

hdparm -d1X69
to enable UDMA mode 5

and so on.

Hope that helps,
Bijan


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On Sun, 6 Jul 2003, Carl Fink wrote:

> I'm puzzled. A few days ago I installed a new Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 40 GB
> hard drive on my system, replacing a fairly old 1 gig drive. I installed it
> as slave to my existing 8 gig drive, which holds Debian. I intended to use
> it for data (video files, etc.). I created a swap partition (128 MB) and a
> 20 gig ext2 partition, leaving the rest of the drive unused for later.
>
> Since booting with this setup, my system has been dramatically *slower* than
> before, particularly when reading from and/or writing to the new drive.
> Even things that I wouldn't expect to depend on drive speed, like redrawing
> of graphical elements in X, are something like four times slower than
> before.
>
> Does anyone have a suggestion on why this would happen? Or where I can find
> more information?

you cannot mix different speed drives on the same ide cable ...
- similarly, you cannot mix 2MB buffer disks with 8MB buffer disks
( the hw doesnt know what to do )

put your 40GB on its own ide cable as Master.. make sure its 80-
conductor.. and that your bios supports it ( reports it as a 40GB drive )

leave the working prev 1GB drive alone.. on its own cable

and as posted earlier, make sure you have DMA enabled and -X at the right
speeds

c ya
alvin


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On Mon, Jul 07, 2003 at 02:34:35AM -0700, Alvin Oga wrote:

> you cannot mix different speed drives on the same ide cable ...
> - similarly, you cannot mix 2MB buffer disks with 8MB buffer disks
> ( the hw doesnt know what to do )

That's odd. Not to say "That's stupid." The whole point of introducing IDE
was to make drive installation simple and not require the user to know the
details of the hardware, but they left this huge flaw in it?

> put your 40GB on its own ide cable as Master.. make sure its 80-
> conductor.. and that your bios supports it ( reports it as a 40GB drive )

The BIOS handles it fine.

> leave the working prev 1GB drive alone.. on its own cable

I don't have four controllers here. I have four IDE drives and only two
channels. Would it be effective to put each HDD on its own cable, with a
CD drive as a slave?

> and as posted earlier, make sure you have DMA enabled and -X at the right
> speeds

The earlier post didn't make it to me, I'll have to check the archive --
thanks for mentioning it.
--
Carl Fink carl@fink.to
Jabootu's Minister of Proofreading
http://www.jabootu.com


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On Mon, 7 Jul 2003, Carl Fink wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 07, 2003 at 02:34:35AM -0700, Alvin Oga wrote:
>
> > you cannot mix different speed drives on the same ide cable ...
> > - similarly, you cannot mix 2MB buffer disks with 8MB buffer disks
> > ( the hw doesnt know what to do )
>
> That's odd. Not to say "That's stupid." The whole point of introducing IDE
> was to make drive installation simple and not require the user to know the
> details of the hardware, but they left this huge flaw in it?

leave it to them to assume the people will call them for "tech support"
that we'd pay them to answer questions ...
- some disks are worst than others in terms of ide support
and timeouts

> > put your 40GB on its own ide cable as Master.. make sure its 80-
> > conductor.. and that your bios supports it ( reports it as a 40GB drive )
>
> The BIOS handles it fine.

when you are running at speed ... you will see significant degradation
in signal on a 40 conductor vs 80 conductor ide cables...
-- dont bother using 40conductor cables

> > leave the working prev 1GB drive alone.. on its own cable
>
> I don't have four controllers here. I have four IDE drives and only two
> channels. Would it be effective to put each HDD on its own cable, with a
> CD drive as a slave?

if you mix different speed drives.. both dirves will work only as fast
as the slowest disk on your system

get another ide controller for $10 and put each disk of different
ata-speeds on different cables
- keep cdroms/dvd all by itself ...

> > and as posted earlier, make sure you have DMA enabled and -X at the right
> > speeds
>
> The earlier post didn't make it to me, I'll have to check the archive --
> thanks for mentioning it.

hdparm -d 1 -X 69 -c 3 -u1 /dev/hda

-- set dma ( -d 1 )
-- set ata speed ( -X69 == ata100 == udma5 )
"hdparm -iv | grep udma" will tell you your max udma speed it
supports
-- set u1 if you wanna go faster ( 5% or so ) over the course of a day
-- set io xfer speed ( -c 3 == 32bit i/o )
-- more options to play with

some options are supported by some drives/bios .. others are not

use the wrong set of options and you just rendered/scrambled your data on
the disk worthless ...


having a slow system due to adding a disk is equally bad as a scrambled
disk..... ( fix the problems that causing the symptoms )
-- dont mix drives unless they are both ata-100
and both have 2MB disk buffers .. etc.etc..

c ya
alvin


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Alvin Oga wrote:
>
>...
> - similarly, you cannot mix 2MB buffer disks with 8MB buffer disks

Unless someone can confirm that, I believe that statement is bogus.

How would different buffer sizes cause incompatibility? The IDE
controller doesn't care whether a requested sector comes from the
cache or comes from the disk.


Daniel
--
Daniel Barclay
dsb@smart.net


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On July 7, 2003 08:34 pm, Daniel B. wrote:
> Alvin Oga wrote:
> >...
> > - similarly, you cannot mix 2MB buffer disks with 8MB
> > buffer disks
>
> Unless someone can confirm that, I believe that statement is bogus.

yup, thats complete bullshit. I have a drive with a 2MB Cache IBM
Deathstar 60GXP and one of those 8MB cache Western Digital drives in
my system with no slowdown or other problems...

~leo


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On Mon, Jul 07, 2003 at 06:58:38AM -0700, Alvin Oga wrote:

> get another ide controller for $10

Actually $45 was the cheapest one I could find locally. Maxtor ATA/133,
which is really a Promise card.

And the advice was correct. Once I got around to installing the thing,
speed returned to normal. I have the boot drive on channel 1 of the
motherboard controller, my two CD drives on channel 2, and the Maxtor 40 gig
drive on channel 1 of the new controller.

In setting things up, I found EVMS, a wonderful utility if you don't know
which drive ended up as which device. I recommend it to anyone installing
new drive controllers or drives.
--
Carl Fink carl@fink.to
Jabootu's Minister of Proofreading
http://www.jabootu.com


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