[SunHELP] IDE ATA100 performance on x86/Solaris8

[Kevin Stevens]

On Fri, 25 Jan 2002, R D wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Is there any way to force IDE ATA100 hard drives under
> solaris 8 on intel to work in the ATA100 or ATA66 mode
> (not in standard mode). So is there any tool like
> "hdparm" under linux to force some of this modes? Any
> other way to improve hdd performance?
>
>  For example on relatively well tunned linux on the
> same hardware I have about 6 times better disk
> performance than on untuned Solaris 8. How can I tune
> it?
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
> Rossen D.
> Great stuff seeking new owners in Yahoo! Auctions!
> http://auctions.yahoo.com

The only thing you can do from a disk perspective is to make *sure* that
you are running in DMA mode.  It is not the default, you have to change it
 (easiest is via eeprom command, ata-dma-enabled=1).  If that is not set,
your disk performance will be abysmal, as well as incurring a hefty CPU
load during IO.  Note that I have had to tweak advanced BIOS settings on
some systems to get this to work, usually you want to turn OFF advanced
disk settings.  It will usually either work or not work, so there isn't
prolonged testing required.

Once that is working, you are basically dependent on the UDMA setting
negotiated by the onboard controller at startup, so for example if you
need to set that to UDMA100 rather than AUTO in order to force the drive
into that mode, go ahead and do so.  Solaris doesn't play a part in that.

KeS

BTW, here's a reasonable disk speed test from a 1GHz Athlon Solaris 8
system, w/5400rpm drive at UDMA66:

babelfish# time mkfile 512m testfile

real    0m31.521s
user    0m0.040s
sys     0m12.860s