increasing dd disk to disk transfer rate

[Gilbert Fernandes]

> My notebooks' hard disk, a Hitachi Travelstar 80 GB starts to
> develop read errors.

Since you are using a modern disk, you should check your smart counters. I
know how to do it on NetBSD, and I believe the command is also available on
FreeBSD. First, you have to turn on the smart (S.M.A.R.T.) stuff on the
hard-disk.

Then you can poll the hard disk and have counters reported back to you with
precious information about errors :)

Here is what I get from atactl on NetBSD :

{/root}
[root][1] atactl wd0 smart status
SMART supported, SMART enabled
id value thresh crit collect reliability description                    raw
  1 100   51     yes online  positive    Raw read error rate            0
  3 100   25     yes online  positive    Spin-up time                   2944
  4 100    0     no  online  positive    Start/stop count               453
  5 253   10     yes online  positive    Reallocated sector count       0
  7 253    0     no  online  positive    Seek error rate                0
  8 253    0     no  offline positive    Seek time performance          0
  9 100    0     no  online  positive    Power-on hours count           7010
 10 253    0     no  online  positive    Spin retry count               0
 12 100    0     no  online  positive    Device power cycle count       9
191 100    0     no  online  positive    Gsense error rate              35
194 112    0     no  online  positive    Temperature                    42
195 100    0     no  online  positive    Hardware ECC Recovered        
1981492
196 253    0     no  online  positive    Reallocated event count        0
197 253    0     no  online  positive    Current pending sector         0
198 253    0     no  offline positive    Offline uncorrectable          0
199 200    0     no  online  positive    Ultra DMA CRC error count      0
200 100    0     no  online  positive    Write error rate               0
201 253    0     no  online  positive    Soft read error rate           0
223 253    0     no  online  positive    Load/unload retry count        0
225 100    0     no  online  positive    Load/unload cycle count        5513
255 100    0     no  online  positive    Unknown                        0

So by checking your own counters, you might get hints from the hardware that
something is wrong there.

Then, there is a web page with tools from Hitachi (IBM) that allow you to
boot and check your disk :

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

Which such tools, you can have access to some functions that are not
available from our beloved BSD like turning ON the "check the noise you do
and try to be quiet" option :)

The feature tool will let you do that :

Change the drive Automatic Acoustic Management settings to the:

    * Lowest acoustic emanation setting (Quiet Seek Mode), or
    * Maximum performance level (Normal Seek Mode).

I was using a disk like yours on my Thinkpad X30. I replaced it with a
Samsung which has the same kind of tools available and usually in the form
of bootable floppies.

Hope this will help !

--
unzip ; strip ; touch ; grep ; find ; finger ; mount ; fsck ; more ; yes ;
fsck ; umount ; sleep