slow hard disk

[Andy Green]

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On Sunday 16 November 2003 00:25, Christophe Le Guern wrote:

> > >if someone have the solution, I'm very interested.
> >
> > no, sorry  :-(

Just a thought -- I have an old noname 200MHz Pentium (2?) laptop here with a 
2.5" drive which started exhibiting the same behaviour on RH9 some months 
ago.  The cause turned out to be the drive's interpretation of setting the 
spindown timer (for power conservation) to 0... it allocated itself zero time 
to be spun up before it wanted to spin down.  Each access it would spin up 
fully, make the access and then start spinning down, on the next access it 
would take a deadtime after spinup before the drive was ready to make the 
access.  Result: drive operated at 1/20th of its normal speed, but it 
operated.  You couldn't necessarily hear the drive spinning up and down since 
it may not have spent any real time losing velocity, its the post spinup 
deadtime that does the damage.

On my drive it would become happy towards the end of the boot process, when 
hdparm got executed, I assumed.

Check out the hdparm settings for the drive power management/spindown 
settings, there's also some flag that makes the setting sticky at the drive 
between powerdowns.

- -Andy
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