Very slow writing to SATA disk

[Peter Jeremy]

On Fri, 2005-Oct-28 01:18:03 -0400, Mikhail T. wrote:
>I've got a new Hitachi drive with 16Mb of cache:
>
>	ad8: 476940MB <HDS725050KLA360 K2AOA11A> at ata4-master SATA150
>
>and am trying to use it to store backups online. Unfortunately, writing
>to the disk is painfully slow (by today's standards) -- it can barely
>keep 7Mb/second and my other (SCSI) disks run circles around it.

If this drive doesn't support tagged-queueing, is the write cache
disabled?  I get that sort of performance from a (PATA) disk with
the cache disabled (hw.ata.wc="0" in loader.conf)

>According to smartctl, the drive runs at 56C during the copying. Its
>idle temperature seems to be 54C.

I'd double-check that (eg with a finger).  If the drive really is
running at 56°C, it won't last very long.

-- 
Peter Jeremy