Really slow HDD

Hi,

I have a new opensuse11.0 installation. The harddisk is currently writing at around 3MB/s. It is an IDE device. I thought it was maybe DMA related, so tried hdparm -d /dev/sda. The following was returned:

/dev/sda:
HDIO_GET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device

I’ve looked at sdparm too, but don’t have a clue how it could help.

Help muchly appreciated.

Benoni