{"id":226,"date":"2006-08-10T01:42:33","date_gmt":"2006-08-09T16:42:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2006-08-10\/226"},"modified":"2006-11-17T21:36:48","modified_gmt":"2006-11-17T12:36:48","slug":"adding-a-05tb-drive-an-default-dma-settings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2006-08-10\/226","title":{"rendered":"Adding a 0.5TB Drive and Default DMA Settings"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\n\nYesterday, I went to<\/span> Fry's again<\/a> to pick up a Big<\/span>\nDisk for my server (the one hosting my book's\nsite<\/a> and this blog). I was happily<\/span> surprised to find that they had a\nsale,<\/span> ending that day, on Seagate\n500GB hard drives<\/a>, with a 5-year warranty, no less. Normally $300, they\nwere on sale for $200. I hadn't<\/span> even noticed the sale price, and was\nconsidering a different<\/span> brand (I don't<\/span> have a great<\/span> feeling about Seagate,\nbut then, I don't<\/span> have a great<\/span> feeling about any<\/i> hard disk\nmanufacture, but have not had any experience yet, good nor bad, with\nHitachi, so was considering their 500GB drive for $270) when the sales guy\nnoticed I was<\/span> looking at 500GB drives and pointed out the sale. I appreciated<\/span> that.\n\n<\/p>\n \n

\n\nIt was a fully-boxed disk, not an unboxed bulk OEM version, so has a 5-year\nwarranty. Other brands I noticed<\/span> had a 3-year warranty. The difference<\/span> doesn't seem so great to me, though, since three years from now, I'm sure a<\/span>\n0.5TB disk like this will be cheap, and considered to be on the small side\nof things.\n\n<\/p>

\n\nAnyway, I bought<\/span> it and drove to the ISP to install it. (I should<\/span> note that my hosting is\ncomplimentary of Peak Web Hosting<\/a>\nwith the network managed by Peak Web Consulting<\/a>, for which\nI remain<\/span> ever grateful.)\n\n<\/p>

\n\nI installed the drive and put the most-excellent Reiser file system<\/a>\n(reiserfs<\/b>) onto it. “df -h<\/b>” showed a size<\/span> of\n460G<\/b>. Sweet. I then started<\/span> a copy<\/span> of 70 gig worth of data\nfrom a drive<\/span> on loan from a friend.<\/span> I knew it<\/span> would take a while,<\/span> so I\nwhipped<\/span> up a little<\/span> Perl app to watch the drives, calculate running copy\nspeed, and predict when it would complete.\n\n<\/p>

\n\nIt was slow going. The copy was<\/span> running at less than two megabytes\/second. Ugh.\n\n<\/p>

\n\nI checked out the disk settings with hdparm (“hdparm -i \/dev\/hdc<\/b>”)\nand noticed that DMA<\/a> was not\nturned on. I turned<\/span> it on (“hdparam -d1 \/dev\/hdc<\/b>”) and saw the copy\nspeed go up by over 11×.\n\n<\/p>

\n\nAn 11×<\/b> speedup via one setting change.\n\n<\/p>

\n\nI don't know whether the lack of DMA by default is the drive's fault, the\ncontroller's fault, the motherboard's fault, or the OS's fault, but because\nDMA is turned on for the other drives by default, I suspect<\/span> it's the drive. So be careful<\/span> to check that DMA is on after installing a new<\/span> IDE (aka\n“ATA” aka “PATA”) drive. (It's not an issue with\ndrives using the more modern SATA<\/a> interface.)\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, I went to Fry's again to pick up a Big Disk for my server (the one hosting my book's site and this blog). I was happily surprised to find that they had a sale, ending that day, on Seagate 500GB hard drives, with a 5-year warranty, no less. Normally $300, they were on sale for $200. I hadn't even noticed the sale price, and was considering a different brand (I don't have a great feeling about Seagate, but then, I don't have a great feeling about any hard disk manufacture, but have not had any experience yet, good [...]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}