OK, got a 200GB Seagate drive to add to my master backend. Decided to go the LVM route with it so I could add it to my /dev/hda4 partition's 130GB or so of space. I haven't even gotten to that point yet because my read performance is obviously not good... playback of recordings is stuttering, not badly but definitely noticeable.

I followed the LVM HOWTO on the wiki:

http://knoppmythwiki.homelinux.org/inde ... e=LvmHowTo

I also figured I would need to turn on DMA on the new drive so I edited /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh to turn DMA and other stuff on with /dev/hdb according to the optimizing HD article on the wiki and a LinuxDevCenter article:

http://knoppmythwiki.homelinux.org/inde ... erformance
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/lin ... dparm.html

I've played with a bunch of settings combination for hdparm in bootmisc.sh but none of them are staying after a reboot. Doing hdparm /dev/hdb after a reboot I get:



I get good buffer-cache reads but lousy buffered disk reads from hdb:



The relevant part of my /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh currently reads:



Still playing but any assistance would be appreciated, especially on how to get DMA to stay on for my drives. Thanks.

well couple of things

1) have you tried running hdparm from a command line after booting to see if you get any messages?

2) I would drop the -x66 switch as you are probably using a dma100 or better drive, and it will do nothing but slow you down, and the -c switch is a toggle switch for 32bit I/O so it can only be 0 or 1 3 is not a valid argument.

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Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

Thanks for the hints on the different settings.

If I run hdparm from the command line I can turn DMA on just fine. It's turning it on at startup that isn't working with the edits to bootmisc.sh.