SATA drive is sloooooow...?!?

[QQ_ghost]

All my data transfers to/from my SATA drive are done at <15MB/sec, how do I improve this?

board: K9N6PGM2-V2 (MSI)
CPU: AMD Athlon 64X2
RAM: 2GB
SDB: 1.5TB SATA II

EDIT: just copying a file on on the drive is at 10MB/sec.

[djohnston]

Is your BIOS set for IDE or AHCI?

[QQ_ghost]

Where would I find that? I've never seen a setting for something like that.
...And what does it do?

[T6]

ideally should be 20 or 30 mbps isn't?  the mainboard is sata II capable

transfer form where to where?  copy inside the hard disk to another place rarely is a fast task, copy to a external media depends on the usb port used and the usb device used

please describe with detal howyou get this speed and the hardware used to see this values

a friend has one of those and that is the speed i get more or less in windows xp when i fix it copying files from/to a external usb drive

if i remember well, this mainboard doesn't have this ahci setting

"Where would I find that? I've never seen a setting for something like that.
...And what does it do?"

in the bios of your mainboard, press del button when you see the mainboard booting to enter bios

[QQ_ghost]

As far as I have seen, there is no "IDE or AHCI" setting in BIOS.  From one HD to another in windows is ~20MB/s, in Linux it is about 12MB/s.
I did see that "bus mastering" was turned off, though.  Turning this on did improve things. Windows now sees ~35MB/s rates, and that is Win2k not XP.

Code:

[root@localhost root]# hdparm -tT /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb:
 Timing cached reads:   1654 MB in  2.00 seconds = 826.88 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 266 MB in  3.02 seconds =  88.01 MB/sec
[root@localhost root]#

But...

Code:

[root@localhost Linux]# dd if=/mnt/1t/File\ bin/ISO\'s/Linux/lucid\ puppy\ 5.25.iso of=/root/deleteme.bin
261548+0 records in
261548+0 records out
133912576 bytes (134 MB) copied, 5.27582 s, 25.4 MB/s

Code:

[root@localhost Linux]# dd if=lucid\ puppy\ 5.25.iso of=deleteme.bin
261548+0 records in
261548+0 records out
133912576 bytes (134 MB) copied, 24.6866 s, 5.4 MB/s

Why is there such a speed difference, and why is transferring to a slower PATA drive that much faster than copying back on the drive?

[AS]

Code:

[root@localhost Linux]# [color=red]dd[/color] if=/mnt/1t/File\ bin/ISO\'s/Linux/lucid\ puppy\ 5.25.iso of=/root/deleteme.bin
261548+0 records in
261548+0 records out
133912576 bytes (134 MB) copied, 5.27582 s, 25.4 MB/s

Hi,

while using the dd command to copy a large file, you should use at least some reasonable block size, otherwise your stats are greatly affected by the facts that dd is copying one byte at once. Please retry using the following:

dd if=/mnt/1t/File\ bin/ISO\'s/Linux/lucid\ puppy\ 5.25.iso of=/root/deleteme.bin bs=1M

Regards
AS

[kjpetrie]

Why is there such a speed difference, and why is transferring to a slower PATA drive that much faster than copying back on the drive?

Because copying to the same drive means the head has to read, then move to a new track, wait for the disc to rotate and then write. Copying to a different drive means the head can just keep reading the file while the other head on the other drive just keeps writing.