Hi, everyone! My system is Abit BP6 w/Dual Celeron 500MHz CPUs & 128MB PC-100 SDRAM on board. One 18GB IBM UDMA-66 7200rpm HDD (master) & One 20GB IBM UDMA-66 7200rpm HDD (Slave) connected to the first ATA-66 channel.
I frist installed the Gentus Linux (Abit's RedHat-based distribution) from the CD come with the main board, and both SMP and UDMA-66 functioned at after the first boot. (It's almost a painless installation - very smooth indeed.) Execute "hdparm -t /dev/hde6" gave a benchmark of something like 20MB per sec (very impressive! I have another system running dual PIII-600 Coppermine with two 9GB SCSI HDD which gave a figure something like 18MB/sec) Then, I changed my mind to remove Gentus and install Debian Potato. By choosing installation from floppies, I downloaded all the required image including the UDMA-66 patch from ftp://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/dists/potato/main/disks-i386/2.2.15-2000-06-07/images-1.44/udma66/ Installation was fine (the rescue disk could detect the ATA-66 HDD - no need to swop them to ATA-33 channel during installation). SMP was not ready yet. Kernel had to be recompiled. No Problem! However, when I did "hdparm -t /dev/hde6" & "hdparm -t /dev/hdf1", this time it gave a figure between 2 to 3 MB per sec. Even slower than a ATA-33 5400rpm HDD in a single PII-266 64MB RAM system. Q.1/ Can anyone explain to me this phenomenon? Q.2/ How to optimize my system performance (esp the UDMA-66 HDD) with Debian Linux? Many thanks for your help! Wilson
