Hard rive speed : raw vs formatted ?! :-(((

Vincent Trouilliez vincent.trouilliez at modulonet.fr
Mon May 2 13:07:12 UTC 2005


I just replaced my main hard drive, with a brand new one.
Using hdparm, it managed only about 17MB/s.
"Out of the box" (unpartitioned), the new/replacement drive managed an
amazing 60MB/s.
I couldn't wait to transfer Ubuntu on it to see how much it would
improve things. But, once the system was "cloned" on it, hdparm would
only return about 27MB/s ... not even half the first reading !

What the hell happened to the drive  ? :o(
I don't understand why would a partitioned and formatted disk be 50%
slower than a "raw" disk ?! I feel like cheated on... :o(

I couldn't believe it. I thought that maybe the problem was that when I
cloned the disk, it was plugged as single master on hdc, but once
cloned, was being plugged a master, hda, but with a slave hard drive
(which contains breezy) on hdb. I turned hdb off with hdparm prior to
running the test on hda, but no luck.
So I unplugged hdb altogether, to leave hda alone on the IDE bus, then
ran the hdparm test again from a live CD, hoping for the best but....
no, speed was still stuck to 30MB/s max !

I made sure that the "acoustic management" was set to "loud/fast", which
it was.

So really, I can't see any explanation other than putting the
partition/filesystem/data on the disk...and I still can't understand it
would make any difference regarding the hdparm test.

Sure, 30 MB/s is a lot better than 17, but it's extremely frustrating to
know that it should/could do twice as fast ! :o((((


Heeeeeeelp... :o(


--
Vince, extremely disappointed/frustrated...





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