SATA HDD Slow as Hell

[zeland]

I got myself a new Athlon 3000+, 1GB RAM pluged on to a nice Asus A7n8x Deluxe with an 80GB SATA HDD running on RH9. The SATA controller is a Silicon Image 3112 chip. The problem is that the new HDD is slow as hell. My old 10GB is almost twice as fast if not more and doesn't give me any stalling problems i.e. renaming a file take about 5-10 seconds on my SATA HDD and during that period of time everything in linux stalls untill the file get renamed.

Does Linux have problems supporting SATA or do I need any special upgrades. Tried looking over at Asus website but only found drivers for RH7.3

 

[AP81]

Brand/model?

 

[zeland]

Maxtor/6Y080M0 (80GB, 7200RPM, 8MB Cache)

hdparm -t /dev/hde returns a score of about 1.46MB/s. My old banger(10GB IDE) gives me 6.86MB/s. Enabling DMA puts my drive into read-only mode with lots of errors coming up on screen.

 

[zeland]

Update:

The problem was a faulty HDD. However, the faulty HDD was only half the problem. Even after using a new HDD, issuing the command

"hdparm -c3u1d1 -X66 /dev/hde"

would still cause my HDD to go into "Read-only" mode and prompt error such as:

dma_time expiry: dma status == 0x21
timeout waiting for DMA
status error: status = 0x58 {DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest}

Breaking the command down into 2 parts:

"hdparm -c2u1 -X66 /dev/hde"
"hdparm -d1 /dev/hde"

works! However, I can't string the whole command together like this

"hdparm -c2u1 -X66 /dev/hde; hdparm -d1 /dev/hde"

Tried putting the broken down command is a shell script but it doesn't work either. I suspect that the drive needs a delay inbetween the 2 commands. If so, this might also be the reason why I can use a startup config file /etc/sysconfig/harddiskhdx where x is the letter of the drive.

 

[zeland]

Oh, one more thing.

After the tweak, I'm getting 50.49MB/s from 1.43MB/s
Oh what JOY!