> i honestly don't like
> the ultra5/10 since i think the IDE disk performance is dreadful.  a
> combination of IDE being dreadful and i hear the sun's IDE drivers aren't
> exactly up to snuff.

Hehe, urban legends: "IDE sucks".

But sure, on the U5 disk performance sucks. Here is why:

pciide0 at pci2 dev 3 function 0: CMD Technology PCI0646 (rev. 0x03)
pciide0: bus-master DMA support present
pciide0: primary channel configured to native-PCI mode
pciide0: using ivec 1820 for native-PCI interrupt
wd0 at pciide0 channel 0 drive 0: <Maxtor 32049H2>
wd0: drive supports 16-sector PIO transfers, LBA addressing
wd0: 19541 MB, 16383 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 40021632 sectors
wd0: drive supports PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 5 (Ultra/100)
wd0(pciide0:0:0): using PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2 (using DMA data transfers)
pciide0: secondary channel configured to native-PCI mode
wd1 at pciide0 channel 1 drive 0: <MAXTOR 4K060H3>
wd1: drive supports 16-sector PIO transfers, LBA addressing
wd1: 57259 MB, 16383 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 117266688 sectors
wd1: drive supports PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 5 (Ultra/100)
wd1(pciide0:1:0): using PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2 (using DMA data transfers)

These disks, in a modern i386, would show snappy performance. But here we
use "DMA mode 2", not the still slow "Ultra-DMA mode 2" (aka Ultra/33), not
to speak of Ultra/66 or Ultra/100.

I have no clue if this is a driver issue or the CMD Technology PCI0646
simply can not do Ultra-DMA. ISTR it is the latter, though. Which means:
there is nothing we could do about it.


Martin