Re: default hdparms? readahead=256? Re: WD 400GB xATA Drives

From: Justin Piszcz
Date: Tue Feb 14 2006 - 04:47:12 EST


Turned out I had too many devices in the box, I have removed them now, still getting those pesky drive errors though, I will try the hdparm soon, thanks.


On Mon, 13 Feb 2006, Mark Lord wrote:

Linda Walsh wrote:
..
set to known values may not contain "great values". My "readahead"
value seems to boot with a value of "256" for all of my drives.

Is this not a bit "excessive"?

Wow.. that does look a bit HUGE. Thanks for pointing it out,
I'm resetting mine back to 128 for now.

Justin Piszcz wrote:
When I write to this disk for a while, I see this in dmesg (only once so far):

[31230.223504] ata6: translated ATA stat/err 0x51/04 to SCSI SK/ASC/ASCQ 0xb/00/00
[31230.223511] ata6: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
[31230.223515] ata6: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }

Is there some sort of smart testing going on constantly? I only get 26-27MB/s on this 400GB/SATA/16MB/7200RPM drive. I use smartmontools to do a daily test. However, even with smart disabled, I get:

# hdparm -t /dev/sde
/dev/sde:
Timing buffered disk reads: 78 MB in 3.06 seconds = 25.46 MB/sec

Does anyone know if this drive has problems in Linux or something?

[ 6.895914] Vendor: ATA Model: WDC WD4000KD-00N Rev: 01.0
...

Some drives suck at sequential reads, in favour of doing random seeks
very very well. Basically, the on-drive seek algorithm may not favour
doing much read-ahead. Try "hdparm -A1" and see if that helps.

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