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Date:      Mon, 30 Sep 2002 14:14:19 -0500 (CDT)
From:      Sean Farley <sean-freebsd@farley.org>
To:        Mike Silbersack <silby@silby.com>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Slow I/O responsiveness with UDMA133
Message-ID:  <20020930140925.G5254-100000@thor.farley.org>
In-Reply-To: <20020926211102.Q9440-100000@patrocles.silby.com>

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On Thu, 26 Sep 2002 21:14, Mike Silbersack wrote:

> On Thu, 26 Sep 2002, Sean Farley wrote:
>
> > I just do not understand how a 5400 RPM UDMA 33 drive can beat a
> > 7200 RPM UDMA 133 drive by 33% on sequential output blocks.
>
> Rumor has it that newer drives cannot write a single sector at a time,
> and instead must read a whole cluster of sectors, add in the new
> sector, and write back the whole cluster.  That behavior sounds like
> it would hurt sequentual performance substantially, as it would become
> a lot of read-modify-write operations.

That is interesting.  I had not heard of that issue, even as a rumor,
before.  I see this hurting byte writes, but block writes may not be
hurt by it.

> > > Does the drive support tagged queueing?  That should give you the
> > > benefits of write caching with a little bit more safety.
> >
> > I thought only IBM had IDE drives which supported tags.  No.  The
> > specs do not mention tags.
>
> Hm, I thought other vendors had started to support them, I guess they
> decided not to. :|

I think there are a few Maxtor SCSI drives with it, but I could not find
mention on their site with regards to any IDE drives.  It would be nice
assuming it was done correctly.

> I have no idea on what BIOS settings would be optimal.  I doubt that
> they'll make a real performance difference.

None as far as I can see.

You would not happen to have a non-RAID, UDMA100+, non-VIA system that
you could run bonnie++ (-s256) on?  It would at least show to me if my
system is really all that far from the norm.

Sean
-----------------------
sean-freebsd@farley.org


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