High load during drive read/write : dmesg output, need help understanding what they are

[Bil-E-daKid]

Guys,

I'm experiencing the exact same problem and it seems to have started in
the last few weeks since dapper was released (can't pin it down any more
than that).

I have 2 x 160Gb SATA drives and, whenever anything starts using disk
reads/writes - even an apt-get install <something>, the whole system
bogs down,  screen redraws take an age and mouse goes all jerky etc.

This is a P4 3Ghz machine running the 686 kernel with SMP extensions
enabled and it has 2Gb DDR400 ram.  It should not (and was not) doing
this a little while ago.

I'd [obviously] really like to fix this and if anyone can tell me how
to check drive performance/errors/bottlenecks etc or what to look for
somewhere else, I would really appreciate it.

(output from hdparm -t -T)

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads:   3912 MB in  2.00 seconds = 1955.88 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:  106 MB in  3.19 seconds =  33.21 MB/sec

/dev/sdb:
Timing cached reads:   4008 MB in  2.00 seconds = 2003.87 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:   72 MB in  3.00 seconds =  23.97 MB/sec

Regards
Bil-E-daKid


-- 
Bil-E-daKid