Low HDD tranfer rate with FreeBSD 5.3-Release

[Jamie Heckford]

On Tue, May 17, 2005 at 10:34:23PM +0200, Hans Ottevanger wrote:
> Amandeep wrote:
> 
> [... dmesg snipped ...]
> 
> >A
> >Eric Anderson wrote:
> >
> >>Amandeep wrote:
> >>
> >>>Hi all,
> >>>
> >>>I am using Tyan S2098 MB with 160GB Maxtor ATA  Drive and the 
> >>>transfer rate is very low. FreeBSD 5.3-Release.
> >>>Any ideas what is going on here.
> >>>
> >>>The transfer rate is about 15MB/s
> >>>
> >>>when I run
> >>>#dd if=/dev/zero of=/usr/junk bs=8192
> >>>
> >>>then do
> >>>#iostat 1
> >>
> >
> Hi,
> 
> I had practically the same problem, i.e. the same very low ATA write 
> speed, with very similar hardware (ASUS P533-E, same chipset and CPU as 
> yours). This occurred with both 5.3-STABLE and 5.4-STABLE.
> 
> I found that the problem disappears when I disable atapi_dma in the 
> loader (or with 5.4, do not enable it). Alternatively, I can use 
> "atacontrol mode 0 UDMA100" to force the ATA channel for the harddisk to 
> UDMA100. I do not know why this works though, I still need some closer 
> investigation. Something weird in the ATA driver must be going on.
> 
> Anyhow, my HDD (WD-1200JB) is up-to-speed now, -45Mbytes/s reading AND 
> writing.
> 

Same here, along with the random crashes around the time periodic runs which was posted the other day.

We are getting all these problems with 5.4-R with the ATA mkIII patches applied also. Will test the atacontrol command and see what happens!

-- 
Jamie Heckford
Network Manager
Trident Microsystems Ltd.

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