Daniel Pittman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Mon, 18 Nov 2002, Olaf Meeuwissen wrote: > > I'm a minimalist and rolled my own kernel. It was absolutely bare > > bones and that had a noticable effect on hard disk performance. So I > > tinkered around a bit with kernel options and tested performance with > > hdparm -tT. Now I'd like to know what all those numbers mean and if > > they are reasonable (for my Dynabook SS S4/275PNHW). > > > > I've repeated all tests five times and dropped outliers. With my > > initial kernel I get > > > > ~110 MB/sec for buffer-cache reads > > ~ 2 MB/sec for buffered disk reads > > > > After tinkering I get > > > > ~ 55 MB/sec for buffer-cache reads > > ~ 14 MB/sec for buffered disk reads > > > > Question 1: Which of the two is "better" and why? > > The second, because 2MB/second is PIO, while the second is DMA > transfers. So, buffer-cache reads may be slower... but not using 100% > CPU when you touch the hard disk is worth it. :) > > > Question 2: Can I do better than this? > > No.
Because? > > I still think hard disk performance is a bit slow but that may be just > > me. > > It is. You have a laptop, which means a 5400RPM drive is *fast*. Don't > expect desktop performance out of these poor little drives. :) I don't. > One of the best ways to improve laptop performance is more memory > because, always, the hard drive performance is not going to be great. Maxed that one out already. -- Olaf Meeuwissen EPSON KOWA Corporation, ECS GnuPG key: 6BE37D90/AB6B 0D1F 99E7 1BF5 EB97 976A 16C7 F27D 6BE3 7D90 LPIC-2 -- I hack, therefore I am -- BOFH
