Dear port-alpha:

What's the biggest IDE disk which can be used successfully with the 
IDE controller on the PWS's main logic board?  I suppose it might 
vary with the vintage of the machine (and SRM version?) -- mine has a 
500 MHz CPU, the Pyxis DMA bug and SRM V7.2-1.  The largest I've 
tried is a 40 GB Seagate ST340016A which wasn't a problem.

That is, creating the biggest partition possible and newfs'ing it was 
fine, but copying my /usr partition--on sd1, containing about 8 
GB--to it took 68 minutes.  That's a rate of only about 2 MB per 
second which seems rather slow.  I tried the same thing again the 
next day and gave up waiting for it to finish after  258 minutes had 
passed, by which time only about 62 MB had been copied.

I also tried connecting the ST340016A to a PCI IDE controller based 
on a CMD chip and copying /usr to it.  That took about 40% longer.

Even copying /usr to another SCSI disk (a Seagate ST318417N) took 109 minutes.

Any thoughts on why it's so slow?  I thought a SCSI to SCSI copy 
would achieve at least 5 MB/s and that a modern IDE disk wouldn't be 
too far behind.  Maybe I shouldn't expect that when so many small 
files are involved?  I've appended part of dmesg's output to this 
email.


Ray



NetBSD 1.6Q (GENERIC) #0: Sun Mar 23 09:34:37 EST 2003
 
root@pws500.jkmrc.uq.edu.au:/usr/obj/sys/arch/alpha/compile.alpha/GENERC
Digital Personal WorkStation 500au, 500MHz, s/n
8192 byte page size, 1 processor.
total memory = 256 MB
(1896 KB reserved for PROM, 254 MB used by NetBSD)
avail memory = 229 MB
using 1639 buffers containing 13112 KB of memory
.
pciide0 at pci0 dev 4 function 0: CMD Technology PCI0646 (rev. 0x01)
pciide0: bus-master DMA support present
pciide0: primary channel wired to compatibility mode
.
pci1 at ppb0 bus 1
pci1: i/o space, memory space enabled
pciide1 at pci1 dev 8 function 0: CMD Technology PCI0649 (rev. 0x01)
pciide1: bus-master DMA support present
pciide1: primary channel configured to native-PCI mode
pciide1: using dec 550 irq 12 for native-PCI interrupt
wd0 at pciide1 channel 0 drive 0: <ST340016A>
wd0: drive supports 16-sector PIO transfers, LBA addressing
wd0: 38166 MB, 16383 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 78165360 sectors
wd0: 32-bit data port
wd0: drive supports PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 5 (Ultra/100)
wd0(pciide1:0:0): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 2 (Ultra/33) 
(using DMA data)
.
siop0 at pci1 dev 10 function 0: Symbios Logic 53c875 (ultra-wide scsi)
.
sd1 at scsibus0 target 1 lun 0: <SEAGATE, ST318436LW, 0005> disk fixed
sd1: 17522 MB, 14384 cyl, 6 head, 415 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 35885168 sectors
sd1: sync (100.0ns offset 8), 16-bit (20.000MB/s) transfers, tagged queueing