HD speeds

[gundamfool]

My Linux system is going rather slow, was wondering if the hard drive could effect it that badly? My system is...
====================================
AMD 750MHZ
PC133 128mb RAM
VOODOO 16mb ram
6GB HD (5400rpm)
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I scrapped the hd from my old computer which was broken but the hd was still working, I am assuming its 5400 rpm cause its about 4 years old....so can the HD make the system that laggy? If I was to upgrade to a hd at 7200rpm would it perform much better?

[This message has been edited by gundamfool (edited 12 January 2001).]

[MkIII_Supra]

Yes it's your hard drive, you are running a UDMA-33 drive on a system designed for a UDMA-66 or better. Drives are pretty inexpensive now see if you can fork over a few $$ and get a newr 7200RPM UDMA-66 20GB. You will see a difference. That and put this in your /etc/rc.local


# Hard Drive speed tweak
hdparm -c 1 -d 1 -k 1 /dev/hda


That way when you reboot, the speed tweaks will take effect during the boot cycle.

[gundamfool]

Yeah, I'll just take my 7200rpm 30gb from my windows box and put it in linux, then back to installing and configuring all over again http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ubb/smile.gif

[slacker_x]

If it is 4 years old it could be lower than 5400 rpm I think

[cs25x]

test it with hdparm
hdparm -t /dev/hda
hdparm -t -c 1 /dev/hda
hdparm -t -d 1 /dev/hda

I could not get any better than 8MB/s
out of a gigabyte GA-5SMM sis 530 chips.
Even compiled a 2.4 kernel and enabled
the support.

I bought an old ( 1998 ) MVP3 MB, plugged the
fireball in and up it goes to 14.45

I was running a k6-2 400, now i am on a
cyrix 333. Same speed on kernel build.
The 333 can take a 100 Mhz bus just like
the 400.
Moral: MB bus is bigger than a CPU clock.

000000000000000000000000000

[Choozo]

Got two IBM DTLA-307030 running on the ATA100 ports on a Abit KT7-RAID/Duron 700/256MB PC133 and Mandrake 7.2 (as-is). This gives me the following whopping speeds:

# hdparm -Tt /dev/hde
/dev/hde:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 1.01 seconds =126.73 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.81 seconds = 35.36 MB/sec

# hdparm -Tt /dev/hdg
/dev/hdg:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 1.02 seconds =125.49 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.79 seconds = 35.75 MB/sec

Not bad, eh? http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ubb/smile.gif

[CMonster]

Choozo - wow! Great speed there. How can I check the speed of my SCSI drive in Linux?

------------------
CMonster says, "You can't choose the right OS if you don't have a choice."

[Choozo]

The speed of SCSI? ...... I haven't the foggiest http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ubb/smile.gif ...... but you could always try to wrestle that info from the 'man' pages?

Cheers!

[CMonster]

BTW - the hard disk speed tweak of putting hdparm -c1 -d1 -k1 /dev/hd* (in /etc/rc.d/rc.local works fantastic for speeding up EIDE CDROMs as well. Although the benchmark "hdparm -Tt" doesn't quite work for CDROMs, I can see about a 40% increase in speed.


The tweak had little or no effect on my son's system, I think because he compiled all the disk optimizations into the kernel.


------------------
CMonster says, "You can't choose the right OS if you don't have a choice."

[This message has been edited by CMonster (edited 14 January 2001).]