Hitachi Travelstar 7K100-100 very slow on Linux & T43P

[gabebega]

Hi,

I have decided to drop windows and reinstall my Thinkpad T43P with Linux (2669-H2G upgraded to latest BIOS 1.29 and embedded controller 1.06)

Since I will be using several VMWare machines, I have decided to replace my 60GB original HD with an Hitachi Travelstar 7K100-100 HTS721010G9AT00.

After replacing the hard disk I started getting the famous error 2010
After following several posts I managed to upgrade the drive firmware and removed the error 2010.

Now I ma trying to install SLED10, the installation goes fine but the hard disk seems extremely slow.
Booting, presenting the login window, loading programs is very very slow.

Sometimes after a cold reboot it seems that the drive work faster. But I cannot tell precisely

I had previously installed SLED 10 on the original 60 GB and I am pretty sure that it was way much faster

I was now wondering.... did I manage to damage my hardisk when I updated the firmware?
Or do I need to pass special parameters to the linux kernel?
Or do I need something else ?
Can I see kernel error messages somewhere (Sorry, really newbie on that)
I tried to install on Ubunto but got same behaviour (ubuntu uses ext3 as file system)

My partition scheme for SLED is
100 MB /boot Rejser
2GB swap
91 GB / Rejser



Thanks for any help

[jdhurst]

See if your hard drive is operating in Ultra DMA mode, or has slipped into PIO mode. If the latter, it *will* be slow. ... JD Hurst

[gabebega]

See if your hard drive is operating in Ultra DMA mode, or has slipped into PIO mode. If the latter, it *will* be slow. ... JD Hurst

Is there any command I can use to verify this ?

From SLED Hardware Info I can get among the others the following:

Block Devices
HTS721010G9AT00
Device Name /dev/sda
Driver ata_piix

Thanks

[jdhurst]

I don't see a command in my Linux machines. In Windows, it is the Primary IDE Channel in the IDE / ATA Controller in Device Manager if that helps to point you in the right direction. ... JD Hurst

[christopher_wolf]

You can either use hdparam or blktool to display and/or set the parameters for a various device. These, however, are commandline tools to set and change the characteristics of a storage device, no general GUI version that I have used.


Check it before you do anything; if I recall correclty, hdparam -v [device] or simply hdparam (-v is the default flag for a null flag argument), should display all the relevant info for that device.

That said, I suspect that your HDD is operating in PIO mode as I regularly run BSD, Linux, and Plan 9 off the 7K100 Hitachi GST HDD in my ultrabay and it is very quick and turns in transfer rates similar to Windows XP operating off the very same HDD.

HTH