Slow IDE disk drive on DS10

[Frank E. Batts]

I have a DS10 with a 10GB Maxtor IDE drive that was originally purchased with Linux. I have since installed Tru64 Unix 5.1b3 on it. All disk dirve operations are extremely slow under this configuration. A system boot can take almost 30 minutes. Any ideas on what my problem can be?

[Alexey Borchev]

It seems like errors / retransmits.
0) Open the box, inspect cables.

1) Try to
dd if=/dev/disk/dskXXÑ of=/dev/null bs=8k

with iostat in parallel and try to see the traffic, varying blocksizes.

2) there is a scu utility - it may show errors on the device.

[Ralf Puchner]

I can't remember if IDE harddrives are on the supported option list of the machine, have you checked it? If not please us a SCSI harddisk which was tested and qualified for DS10 use. The only seen IDE device I can remember is the cdrom. But it sounds funny....

Second step is to have a closer look into the binary.errlog, are there any errors (retransmits, timeouts etc.)?

[Sri_10]

If there are two 10K-RPM hard disks in a system, put the 10K-RPM devices on one bus and put the slower CD-ROM on the other bus. Slower devices will reduce the efficiency of faster devices on the same bus !

Is the boot only taking time, or other I/O also taking much longer ?

Important IDE rules:
DS10 IDE Configuration Rules!
The system motherboard has two IDE buses: primary and secondary. Two IDE devices are allowed on each cable. (though there are three device connectors on the cable to allow for maximum configuration flexibility) However, only two connectors should be used. Always ensure that the last connector on a cable is used
IDE hard disks installed in the system drives MUST be set to either MASTER or SLAVE. These settings are usually made with jumpers on the disk drive.
If there is only one device on a single bus, ensure that device is set to MASTER and is plugged into the last cable connector.
If there is the maximum of two devices on a single bus, ensure that one device is set to MASTER and the other is set to SLAVE. There should never have two MASTERs or SLAVEs on a single bus.
For maximum device performance, group slow devices with slow devices, and fast devices with fast devices. For example, if there are two 10K-RPM hard disks in a system, put the 10K-RPM devices on one bus and put the slower CD-ROM on the other bus. Slower devices will reduce the efficiency of faster devices on the same bus !

The AlphaServer DS10 system provides support for the following storage devices:
DS10 Supported IDE Device Types:
20 GB and 40 GB IDE disk drives

[Frank E. Batts]

Everyone,

Thanks for the help. The problem turned out to be a bad IDE disk drive. I have replaced it and the system runs fine now. There were ocassional SCSI timeout errors in the binary.errlog file but I did not know if there were actually comming from one of the SCSI devices or the IDE drive.

The system was configured just as it arrived from Compaq which did sell it with a 10 GB drive back in 2000 when a 10GB drive was hugh. The SRM test program did not report any errors from the drive. I moved it to a PC and used MAXTOR utilities to test it which reported specific error from the disk.

Again, thanks.