Are you saying that hdparm -T -t is yielding wildly varying results?
Looks similar to failing hd symptoms or bug in IDE layer causing retries
after error/timeout. What's in the logs?
> The drive is attached by itself to the first IDE channel. On the second I
> have a Maxtor 6.8G (90680D4) and a CDROM. hdparm -t on the second drive
> typically gives 8-9 M/sec. I manually set this drive with hdparm -X34
> (mdma2), otherwise it generates errors.
>
> I have tried Linux 2.2.19, 2.4.12, and now 2.4.13, and all exhibit this
> same behavior. I was originally running with a 40-pin cable, and switched
> it to the 80 to see if it might help, but it had no effect. As some
> background information, I was originally running linux off of the second
> 6G drive, and opted to move it onto the 20G because it got better
> performance. Once I did this, however, the drive started performing
> slowly like this, regardless of whether I'm booting to it or the 6G
> drive.
>
> Does this sound like it's just a hardware problem? Has anyone experienced
> anything similar to this? Any advice would be greatly apreciated.
Well, I had problems with drives refusing to do [u]dma.
On my home machine I found out that compiling kernel with support for VIA
chipset allowed udma to work ok (hdparm -T -t = ~20mb/s). Without that
support, my hd was stuck in pio, ~6mb/s.
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