Hi Ed, On Tuesday, 13. August 2002 10:49 Vaessen, E.M.J. (Ed) wrote: first of all, I'd suggest you subscribe to suse-linux-e@suse.com as that list is in English while in suse-linux@suse.com generally German language is used. [...]
From scratch I installed SuSE 8.0 on the system where 1 MAXTOR drive is connected to ide3 (/dev/hde), 1 MAXTOR to ide4 (/dev/hdg) and 1 IBM to ide4 (/dev/hdh). All are ATA/100 discs. All have at least a few Gb free space on each of them.
File copy performance to and from the IBM at /dev/hdh is awfully slow: it starts with a few Megabytes per second and quickly drops to something less than 1 Mb/s. Unusable if you want to copy a video production directory of 35 Gb.
If you copy from /dev/hdh to /dev/hdg this low performance should result in both harddisks being attached to the same controller. As IDE-controllers can handle only one disk at a time, the transfer rate is much lower than copying from one disk to another disk which is attached to another controller.
If I look at the processes with "top" then the CPU-usage of kdeinit (or cp, depending how you start the file copy) rises to more then 80%. The data transfer between /dev/hde and /dev/hdg is better, but here too I witness a drop in performance: starting with 15Mb/s and gradually settling to some 5 Mb/s. Haven't checked CPU-usage here.
Looks like you haven't enabled DMA (Direct Memory Access) for your Harddisk. What output do you get when running hdparm -d /dev/hdX (using e, g and h instead of X) as root? [...] bye Philipp -- registered Linux user number 258854 HOW-TO? -> GOTO http://counter.li.org/