[sclug] Hard drive speeds

[Neil Haughton]

>
>
>- check if both discs are running at their fastest DMA settings. 'hdparm -i
>  /dev/hdx' will show you the modes available, and the currently selected mode
>  is marked with an asterisk.
>
>  
>
Both are running aT udma5, apparently the fastest setting.

>>I found that putting the swap partition on the least often accessed drive
>>made a bug difference.
>>    
>>
>
>That won't make any difference here, as Neil's benchmarking using the parent
>block devices (i.e. /dev/hdx) which should be reading from the rim of the
>disc - i.e. the fastest part (though these days, physical and logical
>geometry may not necessarily tally!)
>
>Personally, I have two discs, so I stripe my swap partition across the two,
>RAID0-style (the swap layer does this automagically if you enable swap on
>more than one device).
>  
>
>derek
>  
>

Best Regards,
Alex.


I'll try this, but as I have 256M of ram and rarely use swap space I 
can't see that making much difference. However, I was more interested in 
why the IBM drive is only 2/3 of the speed of the Seagate. It seems a 
big difference for two modern same-size same-spindle-speed drives.

Neil Haughton