On Thu, 2004-06-03 at 01:12, Stefan G. Weichinger wrote:

> Getting away from AMANDA-topics:
> 
> You should get your IDE-setup straight.

That does seem to be the root of the problem.

> A main point is the bus-mastering. It is also very important to
> performance which device is the master and which is the slave on your
> ide-bus.

I read somewhere that it really doesn't matter -- it's just an
addressing issue. But the hard disks are masters on both cables.

> You have hda and hdc here, which are the primary and secondary
> master-drives on your first (only?) IDE-controller.

And I thought that a & b were controller #1, c & d were #2. I'm using
the controller(s) on the Intel motherboard.

> This is good so far, but you should also enable bus-mastering for you
> controller.

I googled for IDE bus-mastering. It looks like plain old DMA. Is that
all it is? If so, that's done (there's still the 80 core cable issue,
but I know about it).

> Are there other drives at hdb and hdd ? Often these are used for
> CD-ROM-drives.

hdd is a CD ROM. there is no hdb.

> If you REALLY want to get the best IDE-performance, don't use any
> slave-drives. Put in a second IDE-controller (25 bucks maybe) and let
> the faster controller control the disk drives as master drives.

I'll pick up a board when I go out to get the cable. Thanks.

> Look at bonnie and bonnie++ maybe, they will test overall disk
> performance.

(hdparm will do -Tt on SCSI drives, but not -i -- found that out late
last night).

-- 
Glenn English <ghe AT slsware DOT com>