[Ardour-Users] Subject: Re: disk not able to keep up withardour...

[Steve Fosdick]

On Fri, 28 Dec 2007 11:08:02 -0500
"maillistnoll" <maillistnoll at nollcentral.com> wrote:

> In my research I found that since my drives were appearing as IDE drives
> (hda and hdb) I had the choice of running them in PIO mode (typicall slow)
> or in DMA mode (typicall fast). I should have been able to use hdparm to put
> them into DMA mode, but I consistently received an error indicating that the
> system could not do this.

Interesting.  The 4Mb/sec rate seems to be very close to what I was able to get with old PATA drives using PIO mode.  At that time the equivalent rate with DMA was about 25Mb/sec.

My guess is that there is hardware or BIOS emulation of the old PATA IDE interface purely for booting and that it only supports PIO mode.  The operating system, once booted, is expected to use the native SATA mode which is capable of DMA etc and therefore much faster rates.

Steve.