linux seems slow

\_ Well, first test your drive by doing hdparm -Tt /dev/hda (or whatever drive)
\_ and it will give you a transfer benchmark. Then enable 32 bit transfer and
\_ DMA by typing hdparm -c3d1 /dev/hda .

This was quite instructive for me.... The most amusement came when I
noticed my aging scsi disk (5+ years) had better performance than the
default hda conf on a 2 month old [commodity] system:

[new] /dev/hda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 4.31 seconds = 29.70 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 26.50 seconds = 2.42 MB/sec

[aged] /dev/sda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 4.26 seconds = 30.05 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 18.08 seconds = 3.54 MB/sec

After I got done chortling to myself, I tried the hdparm -c3d1 trick
and lo, the results on part of the test bumped up significantly:

/dev/hda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 4.22 seconds = 30.33 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 4.43 seconds = 14.45 MB/sec

It's nice to know that technology that's five years newer can make a
difference. What's sad is that the technology doesn't self enable....

David