Poor SATA Performance

[dafl00]

I'm noticing that my hard drive's performance is REALLY slow in fedora as compared to any other distro.

I wonder if there's any way to speed things up a bit

dmesg out:

ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:00:1f.2[A] -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 177
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:1f.2 to 64
ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xFE00 ctl 0xFE12 bmdma 0xFEA0 irq 177
ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xFE20 ctl 0xFE32 bmdma 0xFEA8 irq 177
ata1: dev 0 cfg 49:2f00 82:7c6b 83:7f09 84:4003 85:7c69 86:3e01 87:4003 88:207f
ata1: dev 0 ATA, max UDMA/133, 312500000 sectors: lba48
ata1: dev 0 configured for UDMA/133
scsi0 : ata_piix
...
ATA: abnormal status 0xFF on port 0xFE27
scsi1 : ata_piix
  Vendor: ATA       Model: Maxtor 6Y160M0    Rev: YAR5
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 05
SCSI device sda: 312500000 512-byte hdwr sectors (160000 MB)
SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back
SCSI device sda: 312500000 512-byte hdwr sectors (160000 MB)
SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back
 sda: sda1 sda2 sda3
Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
kjournald starting.  Commit interval 5 seconds
EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
FDC 0 is a post-1991 82077
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:00:1f.5[B] -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 185
....

anyone have any idea what might cause the slowdown?

[dafl00]

Following this thread can't help but wonder if it has to do with the way fedora install formatted my hard drive....

[nandowong]

what does hdparm -Tt give you?

[nandowong]

mine is pittyful i get :


/dev/hda:
Timing cached reads: 620 MB in 2.00 seconds = 310.60 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 22 MB in 3.25 seconds = 6.76 MB/sec

[Thetargos]

Looks like DMA is not working as it should.

The solution would be to have new libata drivers, I don't know if you could build them separately or if you'd have to build them with the rest of the kernel...

Edit
These are my IDE ATA 100 drive numbers:

/dev/hde:
Timing cached reads: 2000 MB in 2.00 seconds = 999.15 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 124 MB in 3.03 seconds = 40.98 MB/sec

(I don't have any S-ATA drives, though I have S-ATA on my MoBo)

[dafl00]

hdparm on my sata doesn't work .. gives me nothing but error messages.. my libata's came from 2.6.14 kernel souce.. the o.s. as a whole was prettty slow and my own options sped things up a lil .. i think i'll try another file system and see any improvements

[Seve]

Hi:
I would agree that DMA is not working as it should? I just recently installed FC4 on a SATA2 drive with 0 problems, however the drives are set/configured to ata133 speeds?
Here is the output from my ATA133 FAT32 drive:
/dev/hdc1:
Timing cached reads: 3872 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1935.88 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 176 MB in 3.03 seconds = 58.12 MB/sec
Here is the output from a Sata2 drive:
/dev/sdb6:
Timing cached reads: 3828 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1913.88 MB/sec
HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(null) (wait for flush complete) failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
Timing buffered disk reads: 166 MB in 3.04 seconds = 54.67 MB/sec
HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(null) (wait for flush complete) failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
The Sata2 drivers are attached to an nVidia Onboard controller which FC4 2.6.14-1.1653_FC4smp, recognizes correctly as Sata2, [SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123)] however, when it comes to the drives it is a different story.

Seve

[Thetargos]

I'll say it again. This depends as much as anything else on two things: Your chipset and the kernel you are running. The kernel-side modules are quite important as there's constant tweaking and tunning of the S-ATA drivers (by means of the libata drivers) which eventually get merged into the mainline kenrel (which is what Fedora uses for the kernel). Of course the S-ATA chipset you have is also quite important for this matter, as kernel support for that version may not be all that up2date.