disk diagnostics

Bill Hacker wbh at conducive.org
Tue Jul 25 12:34:58 PDT 2006


Pieter Dumon wrote:

Hi,

how can I diagnose my disk read/write throughput under DFLy ?
my system runs well except that untarring even small tar files or
deleting files takes a lot of time (e.g. the removal of
/usr/obj/usr/src/world_i386 during a make buildworld takes about 25
minutes (I admit it's got a lot of files, but still....)).
I don't know if it can have anything to do with my strange
configuration of having the two harddisks on ATA1 while the CDs are on
ATA0. The disk with the DFly slice is only UDMA33 (there are no DFLy
slices on the other disk), but still, under windows and linux I don't
have this slow disk access.
ad2: 28629MB <ST330621A> [58168/16/63] at ata1-master UDMA33
ad3: 76319MB <WDC WD800BB-00JHC0> [155061/16/63] at ata1-slave UDMA100
acd0: DVD-R <AOPEN DUW1608/ARR> at ata0-master PIO4
acd1: CDROM <CD-ROM 36X/AKU> at ata0-slave PIO4
regards,

Pieter
Agree that is not an optimal set up - faster IDE drives uusally fare best on 
80-pin cable to ad0 (master) and ad2 (master) with CD's as slaves, or better 
yet, on a PCI-bus add-on controller so there is no master/slave speed difference.

But neither should it take 25 minutes to do the removal.

Perchance, is something *else* running at the same time (what is in 'top'?)

Or is extensive other activity hitting the same device/slice/partition as that 
being rm'ed? (head thrashing...)

Or - perchance is a background fsck running on another part of the media you are 
trying to utilize?

Bill






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