Disk performance - Dell Precision M50

[Glen Staufer]

I've been working with Fedora Core 3 - Test 2 on a Dell Precision M50
with an IBM Travelstar 60gb 5400rpm hard disk.  I'm having a real
problem with disk performance (as measured with hdparm -tT).  With the
default hdparm settings (no DMA, etc) my MB/sec figures are typically
around 2.

With an hdparm line like this in rc.local:

hdparm -d1 -u1 -c3 -X66 -m16

I can see disk reads around 5MB/sec.

In single-user mode, with these same settings, I get up to 21MB/sec.

The hdparm tests seem to accurately reflect the performance I'm seeing
with this system.  From the Fedora login screen until the X desktop
loads can be up to 5 minutes or longer.

This performance is vastly different from a previous installation of
Gentoo on this same machine.  I ran a series of drive checks over the
weekend and the drive seems to be OK.

Any ideas?

Thanks, Glenn