I could use a 120GB IBM on my DPW 500a succesfully

Rick


On Tue, 25 Mar 2003, Ray Phillips wrote:

> Dear port-alpha:
>
> What's the biggest IDE disk which can be used successfully with the
> IDE controller on the PWS's main logic board?  I suppose it might
> vary with the vintage of the machine (and SRM version?) -- mine has a
> 500 MHz CPU, the Pyxis DMA bug and SRM V7.2-1.  The largest I've
> tried is a 40 GB Seagate ST340016A which wasn't a problem.
>
> That is, creating the biggest partition possible and newfs'ing it was
> fine, but copying my /usr partition--on sd1, containing about 8
> GB--to it took 68 minutes.  That's a rate of only about 2 MB per
> second which seems rather slow.  I tried the same thing again the
> next day and gave up waiting for it to finish after  258 minutes had
> passed, by which time only about 62 MB had been copied.
>
> I also tried connecting the ST340016A to a PCI IDE controller based
> on a CMD chip and copying /usr to it.  That took about 40% longer.
>
> Even copying /usr to another SCSI disk (a Seagate ST318417N) took 109 minutes.
>
> Any thoughts on why it's so slow?  I thought a SCSI to SCSI copy
> would achieve at least 5 MB/s and that a modern IDE disk wouldn't be
> too far behind.  Maybe I shouldn't expect that when so many small
> files are involved?  I've appended part of dmesg's output to this
> email.
>
>
> Ray
>
>
>
> NetBSD 1.6Q (GENERIC) #0: Sun Mar 23 09:34:37 EST 2003
>
> root@pws500.jkmrc.uq.edu.au:/usr/obj/sys/arch/alpha/compile.alpha/GENERC
> Digital Personal WorkStation 500au, 500MHz, s/n
> 8192 byte page size, 1 processor.
> total memory = 256 MB
> (1896 KB reserved for PROM, 254 MB used by NetBSD)
> avail memory = 229 MB
> using 1639 buffers containing 13112 KB of memory
> .
> pciide0 at pci0 dev 4 function 0: CMD Technology PCI0646 (rev. 0x01)
> pciide0: bus-master DMA support present
> pciide0: primary channel wired to compatibility mode
> .
> pci1 at ppb0 bus 1
> pci1: i/o space, memory space enabled
> pciide1 at pci1 dev 8 function 0: CMD Technology PCI0649 (rev. 0x01)
> pciide1: bus-master DMA support present
> pciide1: primary channel configured to native-PCI mode
> pciide1: using dec 550 irq 12 for native-PCI interrupt
> wd0 at pciide1 channel 0 drive 0: <ST340016A>
> wd0: drive supports 16-sector PIO transfers, LBA addressing
> wd0: 38166 MB, 16383 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 78165360 sectors
> wd0: 32-bit data port
> wd0: drive supports PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 5 (Ultra/100)
> wd0(pciide1:0:0): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 2 (Ultra/33)
> (using DMA data)
> .
> siop0 at pci1 dev 10 function 0: Symbios Logic 53c875 (ultra-wide scsi)
> .
> sd1 at scsibus0 target 1 lun 0: <SEAGATE, ST318436LW, 0005> disk fixed
> sd1: 17522 MB, 14384 cyl, 6 head, 415 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 35885168 sectors
> sd1: sync (100.0ns offset 8), 16-bit (20.000MB/s) transfers, tagged queueing
>