Hey folks, im a student of computer science and have been using openSuSe for a while now. I do have a very fast system:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (4x 2.66GHz)
Mainboard: Asus P5Q Pro
RAM: 4GB DDR2 800
DISCS:
200 GB Sata2
400 GB Sata2
nVidia Geforce 8800GT
Everytime i copy files, no matter if it is across hard discs, onto an USB-device or if i just copy a file from on partition onto another on the same HDD i suffer from poor system responsiveness in general. My CPU usage goes very high, and i experience high latency from time to time when i try to do other things (even the mouse stutters sometimes), applications take very long to start. It’s very disturbing, because browsing the web becomes very sluggish as well.
I’m running OpenSUSE 11.1 with KDE 4.2.1, always updated to the latest revisions. But it does not matter, because the same thing happens when i use “cp” in a shell.
I have always had this problem, even when using Gnome in OpenSUSE 11.0. Could it be that DMA is not enabled and all the work for copying files is done by the CPU? And why is it that actually browsing the web while copying one large file is becoming so sluggish. I believe there is a high latency when accessing the hard drive during file transfers, some latency is to be expected, of course, but not at this level. I do not mean to advertise or anything, i do use windows xp for games, and i don’t experience it there.
I’d be happy for any help, suggestions or ideas
Thanks in advance, Dennis
Take a look, in a terminal, at ‘man hdparm’. This not only allows you to view parameters of your hdds but also to set them. It’s a long time since i’ve dealt with hdparm, but some option should solve this.
BTW, have you tried other distro’s? If yes, did you get the same result?
Could you also post the BIOS settings for both disks? I know XP doesn’t care to much, but linux does.
/dev/sdb:
HDIO_GET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
linux-1f7y:/home/dennis #
linux-1f7y:/home/dennis # hdparm -Tt /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 6744 MB in 2.00 seconds = 3374.92 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 176 MB in 3.02 seconds = 58.29 MB/sec
linux-1f7y:/home/dennis # hdparm -Tt /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb:
Timing cached reads: 6840 MB in 2.00 seconds = 3422.33 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 200 MB in 3.03 seconds = 66.07 MB/sec
I’ll look into the BIOS now… maybe there is something i have overlooked.
Edit:
"Sata Configuration: Enhanced [Enhanced | Compatible | Something else i forgot but it was less desirabled…]
“Configure Sata as: IDE [IDE | AHCI | RAID]”
I switched this to AHCI now and i believe it has gotten a little bit better but i can’t tell yet. I also believe my windows installation might fail to boot (because microsoft hadn’t made it out of the stone age yet… they still expect me to have a floppy for SATA drivers during installation… meh…)
