[lug] RH Linux download + hdparm

[John Karns]

On Wed, 17 Oct 2001, Calvin Dodge said:

> On Wed, Oct 17, 2001 at 06:58:00PM +0000, Greg Horne wrote:
> >
> > Do the different distros on them make any differece?  Do the hard drive
> > brands play a big role in this?  Are there any safe tweaks to speed up
> > access times?

> The drives do make a difference - Mom's 500 Mhz K6-based system (with
> a Tyan S1598 motherboard) has a 5 gig Micropolis and a 30 gig IBM.
> The Micropolis maxes out at about 4 megs/second, while the IBM (a 5400
> RPM model) does about 16-17 megs/second.

Indeed, and labels can also be misleading.  I recently bought a 40GB
Quantum ATA-100 drive.  I wasn't so much interested in the data band width
(bw) as much as the large capacity.  In perusing the Quantum Internet site
for the specs on the drive, I discovered that although the drive
electronics has the ATA-100 interface, the rest of the components were
from the ATA-66 drive, with a corresponding throughput.  IOW, just because
a drive has an ATA-100 interface doesn't guarantee that
the drive fully supports the spec.

----------------------------------------------------------------
John Karns                                        jkarns at csd.net