Linux Format forums

nordle · LXF regular Joined: Fri Apr 08, 2005 10:56 pm Posts: 1497

I'm still in windows, (hdparm -d ??), anyway, your drives appear to have the correct settings and should be super fast, >30MB/sec

Does /var/log/messages or syslog etc tell you anything vaguely appropriate?
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Marrea · Posted: Fri Oct 19, 2007 10:37 am Post subject:

I thought hdparm –d /dev/hxx was the command to use to check whether DMA was on or not, and it would come back with either using_dma=0 (off) or using_dma=1 (on). And then if you discovered it was off, you used hdparm –d1 /dev/hxx to turn it on. And then to make it permanent you add a line at the bottom of the hdparm.conf file. I’m sure that’s what I did some time ago in one of my Ubuntu installs. But my SUSE 10.3 is obviously not responding to the command properly.

I'm on a different machine at the moment but will have a look at /var/log/messages and syslog when I'm back on the laptop.

nelz · Posted: Fri Oct 19, 2007 11:52 am Post subject:

Use hdparm -i /dev/hdX or just hdparm /dev/hdX
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Rhakios · Posted: Fri Oct 19, 2007 1:34 pm Post subject:

nelz · Posted: Fri Oct 19, 2007 1:54 pm Post subject:

I was just following on from the /dev/hxx in Marrea's post. Having said that, PATA devices can still be /dev/dhX, it depends on whether you use the older or newer (and still marked experimental) ATA drivers.
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Unix is user-friendly. It's just very selective about who it's friends are.

Marrea · Posted: Fri Oct 19, 2007 5:54 pm Post subject:

Results from hdparm -i /dev/sda and hdparm -i /dev/sr0 are as in my post of yesterday at 08:59 PM.

Results from hdparm /dev/sda etc below.

nelz · Posted: Sat Oct 20, 2007 8:07 pm Post subject:

If you are using drives through the SCSI layer, you may need sdparm instead.
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Marrea · Posted: Sat Oct 20, 2007 9:34 pm Post subject:

Well, I'd been thinking that myself and was actually looking at that sdparm site last night. However, I couldn't see any command which tells you whether you have DMA enabled or not. I am in Fedora 7 on a five year old Evesham desktop at the moment, where the hard drive is shown as sda and my DVD ROM is /dev/scd0, and the hdparm commands don't seem to work properly on those either. Fortunately you can download sdparm from Fedora's Add/Remove Software, which I have just done. As far as I can see, the command sdparm -a /dev/sda [or /dev/scd0] doesn't seem to reveal anything about DMA.

I have xine and libdvdcss installed in Fedora. xine-check reported:

[ hint ] Your DVD drive seems not to be attached via ATAPI.
This might be due to the use of an ide-scsi emulation.
If you really have a SCSI DVD drive, your SCSI controller is likely
to do perfect DMA, so there's no reason to worry about this.
However, if you're using ide-scsi, there is a chance that DMA is
disabled for the DVD drive. Moreover, I don't know how to enable
DMA in that case, so you probably have to live with some performance
loss. (FIXME: check for /proc/ide, provide solution)

plus various OUCHES !! about missing plugins. However, DVDs play perfectly OK in xine in spite of these warnings.

In my googling about sdparm and dma I came across
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=61075
where mlord suggests that "If your disk is showing up as /dev/sda, then DMA is already enabled. No need to fiddle with it."

However the OP there says he has a SATA drive, whereas I don't. I am getting more and more confused about this by the minute.

Marrea · Posted: Fri Nov 09, 2007 8:09 pm Post subject:

Well, I have finally given up on SUSE10.3 on my HP laptop. I have replaced it this evening with Gutsy Gibbon, which so far seems to be much better suited to the hardware. However, OOo Writer (2.3) has just crashed on me, so I hope that is not going to be a regular occurrence!