Re: Hard Drive Speed

[John Summerfield <debian herakles homelinux org>]

Todd Simi wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I know this may be a silly question since it probably a hardware limitation,
> but I'm running F7 and would like to know what I can do to increase the hard
> drive seek time, if anything.

You want to increase the seek time?

Fanky, I think you're nuts. I would rather zero seek time;-)



> I have a pretty new SATA drive at 3GB/sec and it seems to have to seek longer
> than I'd expect.

Don't imagine you are going to get anything like 3 Gbytes/sec. Possibly 
your system memory isn't that quick. If you want disks that go that 
fast, they're available; IBM uses them on its zSeries, but those cost 
serious dosh.

> It's running with DMA4, AHCI, etc.
>
> The rest is an ASUS MB with a Core 2 Duo 6400 @ 2.4 Mhz & 2GB Ram @ 800Mhz.
>
> Are there any setting from the standard that by help?
>
> here's the hdparm output
>
> [root localhost ~]# hdparm -tT /dev/sda
>
> /dev/sda:
>  Timing cached reads:   8608 MB in  2.00 seconds = 4313.28 MB/sec
>  Timing buffered disk reads:  202 MB in  3.02 seconds =  66.79 MB/sec

I'd say that's quite good. This is on my new drive, fairly new HP mobo. 
Intel chips.

[root potoroo ~]# hdparm -t /dev/sda{,}

/dev/sda:
 Timing buffered disk reads:  206 MB in  3.02 seconds =  68.22 MB/sec

/dev/sda:
 Timing buffered disk reads:  204 MB in  3.00 seconds =  67.98 MB/sec
[root potoroo ~]#


The limiting factor is the speed at which data comes off the surface of 
the media, and that's determined by RPM, bit density and the number of 
tracks read at once.



>


--

Cheers
John

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