Re: IDE Harddrive Performance

[Mark Hahn]

> I recommend that you check out the smartsuite package described in
> http://www.linux-ide.org/smart.html.  It showed me that when a Maxtor
> drive I recently purchased dropped from 40MB/sec to 1MB/sec throughput, it
> was having an incredible number of "Hardware ECC Recovered" (SMART
> attribute 195) events.  I guess some bit chunk of the magnetic media had

the smart tools are *VERY* useful.  I recently built a raid box and
installed 5 of the disks in one nice fan-equipped bracket.  unfortunately,
100G WD 7200 RPM's vibrate fairly seriously, and this actually caused
horrible performance, as well as a small number of bad low-level writes 
and thus remapped sectors (shown by smartctl).  simply moving some of the
disks elsewhere entirely fixed the problem (120 MB/s!)

regards, mark hahn.