[lug] Re: advice on disk configuration

[Phil Rasch]

Today I installed a disk controller from Promise (the ultra133 tx2 PCI
card) to drive a couple of seagate 120Gb ata 100 drives I had
bought for a server I am building.

I installed the card and drives and booted.

The PCI cards bios correctly recognized the disks, reporting them as
ultra dma mode 5 (ata 100) cards. The machine (running a debian
install with a 2.4.21 kernel) booted, recognized the card as an
"unknown mass starage controller, and found the disks.

I am trying to figure out whether things are configured correctly and
I dont know enough about how to sort it out to decide.

I guess I am confused because I am seeing the clock rate reported as
66MHz for the controller and disk, and somewhow I expected it to
correlate with the maximum burst rate for those devices, which are 133
and 100 respectively.

If you know this kind of stuff, and can offer advice, please read on,
otherwise quit now. 

Thanks

Phil

The server is a 2.4Ghz pentium, with an 800Mhz FSB.

I used the "lshw" command to query the kernel about
what hardware it sees. it reports the following for the controller and
disk.

          *-storage
                description: Unknown mass storage controller
                product: 20269
                vendor: Promise Technology, Inc.
                physical id: 2
                bus info: pci at 02:02.0
                version: 02
                clock: 66MHz
                capabilities: bus_master cap_list
                configuration: driver=Promise irq=17
              *-ide:0
                   description: Channel 0
                   physical id: 2
                   bus info: ide at 2
                   logical name: ide2
                   clock: 66MHz
                 *-disk
                      description: ATA Disk
                      product: ST3120026A
                      physical id: 0
                      bus info: ide at 2:master
                      logical name: /dev/hde
                      version: 3.06
                      serial: 3JT2D65G
                      size: 111GB
                      capacity: 111GB
                      capabilities: ata dma lba iordy smart security pm
                      configuration: smart=on

If I cat /proc/ide/hde/settings, here is the output

name                    value           min             max   mode
----                    -----           ---             ---   ----
acoustic                0               0               254   rw
address                 1               0               2     rw
bios_cyl                14593           0               65535 rw
bios_head               255             0               255   rw
bios_sect               63              0               63    rw
breada_readahead        8               0               255   rw
bswap                   0               0               1     r
current_speed           69              0               70    rw
failures                0               0               65535 rw
file_readahead          124             0               16384 rw
init_speed              12              0               70    rw
io_32bit                0               0               3     rw
keepsettings            0               0               1     rw
lun                     0               0               7     rw
max_failures            1               0               65535 rw
max_kb_per_request      128             1               255   rw
multcount               16              0               16    rw
nice1                   1               0               1     rw
nowerr                  0               0               1     rw
number                  0               0               3     rw
pio_mode                write-only      0               255   w
slow                    0               0               1     rw
unmaskirq               0               0               1     rw
using_dma               1               0               1     rw
wcache                  0               0               1     rw

If I do a 
hdparm -d1 /dev/hde
hdparm -tT /dev/hde

/dev/hde:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   2624 MB in  2.00 seconds = 1312.00  MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  168 MB in  3.00 seconds =  56.00 MB/sec

There is no difference if I explicitly set udma5 mode with 
hdparm -X69 /dev/hde

Is this the kind of performance I should expect? I can run the
bonnie++ benchmarks etc, but at the moment I am just trying to make
sure the basic configuration is ok.

Thanks again for any advice.

Phil



-- 
Phil Rasch, Climate Modeling Section, National Center for Atmospheric Research
Mail     --> P.O. Box 3000, Boulder CO 80307  
Shipping --> 1850 Table Mesa Dr, Boulder, CO 80305
email: pjr at ucar.edu, Web: http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cms/pjr Phone:303-497-1368, FAX: 303-497-1324