Disk Speed Issues Solved! (at least for me)
I finally found out why I had such a bad disk performance! Actually I wanted to care about this problem later, because I’m traveling at the moment and therefor I wanted to have a stable system. But it got so annoying that I decided to take the risk of breaking the system totally and so I did some more serious research. A simple hdparm -tT /dev/hda revealed the following:
/dev/hda:
Timing cached reads: 7932 MB in 1.99 seconds = 3985.16 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 8 MB in 3.02 seconds = 2.60 MB/sec
So what the heck… why only 2.6MB? And by the way, why is it hda shouldn’t it be sda for a SATA disk?
It turned out that I still had compatibility mode activated in my BIOS, so the kernel recognized the SATA disk as a old style ATA disk which apparently caused this incredible low performance. After 2 minutes of changing /etc/fstab and the boot options in GRUB the hard disk was running with nice 44 MB/s.
What do we learn out of this? Don’t blame always the operating system! Maybe it’s just a wrong BIOS option…
