On Wednesday 02 June 2004 18:48, Jon LaBadie wrote:
>On Wed, Jun 02, 2004 at 04:21:35PM -0600, Glenn English wrote:
>> On Wed, 2004-06-02 at 14:12, Gene Heskett wrote:
>> > Any current ide drive can do 30+ Mb/sec if left
>> > alone by other tasks, often quite a ways on the + side.
>>
>> Is that just a burst out of the cache, or can they read
>> dis-contiguous files, seek around to other files, wait for
>> latency, and write all at the same time that fast? Or even half
>> that fast? If so, and if Linux and Intel's IDE controllers lose
>> another 25% moving bits around, it'd still be comfortably faster
>> than the tape drive. I think I may have something horribly
>> misconfigured.
>
>On Solaris x86, one thing that terribly degrades IDE disk
>performance is if the driver does not use dma but uses pio mode.
>There are even reports of diagnostic tools saying the drive is
>using dma, but digging deeper determines that pio mode is in use.
>
>I know not how to check or configure the HD driver on linux,
>but it might be something to check.

It's true of any os, not just solaris, and I thought of that, but got 
lost and didn't mention it in my novel on this.  Thanks for reminding 
me.  I think I may have assumed he had all that checked out.  My 
mistake.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
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Copyright 2004 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.