FC2 and SATA drives

Gene C. czar at czarc.net
Mon Apr 19 07:27:31 UTC 2004


I have an ASUS SK8V mobo with an Opteron 140 processor.  This mobo has the 
usual ide support plus SATA drive support as:
00:0f.0 RAID bus controller: VIA Technologies, Inc.: Unknown device 3149 (rev 
80)

I have two Maxtor 120GB drives on the system.  The first is a regular ide 
drive and comes up as /dev/hda.  The second is a SATA drive and, under FC2, 
comes up as /dev/hde.  Under FC1, this SATA drive came up as /dev/sda.

I first installed the SATA drive when running FC1 and it seemed to work fine.  
When I installed FC2, it (mostly anaconda and parted) had some problems with 
the partitioning (it was c/h/s rather than lba).  Therefore, I did not use it 
with FC2.

During my FC2 testing I found I needed a much large /home partition.  I had 
stopped using the SATA drive even under FC1.  Well, here is a chance to do 
some testing.

So I did cp -va /home/* to partition on the SATA drive, did rm -rf /home/*, 
updated /etc/fstab to mount the new /home partition, ran setfiles to make 
selinux happy.

Then I started using the new drive ... I needed to build an rpm.  I run 
gkrellm to keep an eye on the system and have it display the individual 
drives.  Wow ... my hde drive sure shows lots of i/o even though not much is 
going on.  This does not look right so I killed the rpmbuild, started 
monitoring /var/log/messages (nothing there).

Then I ran hdparm -t and got the following results:

/dev/hda:
 Timing buffered disk reads:  166 MB in  3.24 seconds =  51.26 MB/sec

/dev/hde:
 Timing buffered disk reads:   10 MB in  3.27 seconds =   3.06 MB/sec

This is not right.  So move /home/ from /dev/hde to a partition on /dev/hda.  
During the copy I noticed that gkrellm said lots of I/O on /dev/hde but 
little was going on on /dev/hda.  In addition, the copy took long "pauses" 
during the copy.

1.  This does not seem right (3.06 MB/sec!?).  Any comments/hints as to what 
is going on?

2. This disk seemed to work just fine under FC1 using libata.  I understand 
that undef FC2 some different code is being used but that the "old" libata 
interface is still there.  The modules.conf/modprobe.conf line is the same in 
both cases:
alias scsi_hostadapter sata_via
If the old interface is still there, is there a way to specify it be used?

-- 
Gene





More information about the fedora-test-list mailing list