T43p SATA to PATA bridge performance issue

[icecube]

Hi all,

I must first say that I will greatly appreciate any lead or help on this issues, as I've almost given, thinking perhaps to contact IBM support and request a machine recall (although the machine is alrady 6 months old, this issue has bothered me since I first bought it, but I was too busy at work to be able to attend to it until now).

My machine has the infamous SATA-PATA bridge known so famously for the hard drive lockdown problem, however, while I am not looking to replace the HD (yet, I'm still in warranty, god knows what'll happen when it's over) I do experience serious performance issues, especially in Linux.

I suspect the issue is being a bit shadowed in windows, since it probably uses more heavy write-behind and read-ahead, still there I used a program called Aida32 to benchmark the drive. In average, it shows 15ms random access time, and 34.5MB/s bandwidth.

Are these numbers right for a 8MB buffer, 60GB 7200 rpm, "stock IBM" hard drive that came with the machine? The problem also is very annoying in linux (I use ubuntu) as while a new debian package gets installed on the system through upgrades etc, the machine essentially comes down on its knees and I can't do anything until this finished.

The machien feels as if it was running DOS back on the old times, and you could do only one thing at a time.

this is the specs of the machine:
PCI-Express bus
1GB DDR2 ram
14.1" SXGA display
PRO/Wireless 2915ABG Network Connection (that has the soon to be famous issue with the WRTG45 routers)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc M24 1T [FireGL M24 GL] (rev 80)
60GB 7200RPM HTS721060G9AT00 hard drive

Has anyone an idea? what more info could I be providing ?

Many thanks in advance,

Sivan

[christopher_wolf]

I benched my HDD on my T43 with HDTune and, for the 5400RPM version of it, it came out about right in agreement with some of the[url=http://www.hdtune.com/testresults.html] benchmark results [/ur] that HDTune has on their website. I looked up your HTS721060G9AT00 HDD and came up with a 15.2 ms access time with a maximum, not averaged, rate of 45.8 MB/sec. For the average time, 37.1MB/sec, it comes out to be actually a little more than your number by ±2MB/sec; which is to be expected as the benching conditions can vary quite a bit between testers. So I would say your drive is operating at spec.

Even in SuSE and Ubuntu, I haven't seen much of any change in performance from a T4X Thinkpad that uses a pure PATA interface....then again, I might have to do more benchmarks, especially in comparison with a 60GB 7200RPM Hitachi to put any differences in a sharper contrast.

[marcos]

Exact disk same as mine. But on my T42 @ 1.7 GHz I get 32.2 MB/s of average transfer rate and 15.3 ms access. Burst rate is 61.0 MB.

Just for reference about this 7200 disk.