FreeBSD, big hard drives and DMA

[Andrew P.]

Hello!

I have a freebsd box with an (in)famous Abit BE6-II board. It has a 
built-in HPT controller in addition to a general one (440BX chipset). 
The HPT handles drives of any sizes, the general one handled anything up 
to around 120Gb. I was amazed when I tried to put a 200Gb drive on the 
common controller, set it to none in the BIOS and freebsd saw every 
single byte of it. Should I praise Soren (forgive me for my spelling) or 
anybody else :-)?

Anyways, when I tried to copy files from another 200Gb drive which was 
on the HPT the speed was fairly high (15-17Mb), but kinda limited. I 
looked at the CPU load - and it was around 65%. I'm a freebsd novice - 
could somebody please tell me how to tune DMA parameters?

Best wishes,
Andrew P.