terrible HD I/O speed on laptops where hdb is the CD (inspiron 8200)

[Alan]

On Sat, 16 Dec 2006 16:32:45 +1030
Tim <ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au> wrote:

> On Fri, 2006-12-15 at 23:45 -0500, Peter Teuben wrote:
> > But the basic problem is that in order for desktops to "automatically"
> > detect that a CD has been added/removed, it has to poll /dev/hdb, but
> > poor little /dev/hda is then interrupted, at least on a Dell 8200 this
> > causes the HD performance to go down by about a factor 2-4.
> 
> Not familiar with that model, but I'm presuming it's not possible to
> move the CD onto a different IDE port?

On some of the Dell laptops this is not possible. The fix is to remove
the Gnome cd polling garbage. That will also do wonders to your battery
life.

And if any gnome person wants to object to the word garbage I'll point
out the problem report is *several years old*

Alan