On Tuesday 03 June 2008 10:17, Tom G. Christensen wrote: > David Mackintosh wrote: > > Hi folks, > > > > I have an HP Proliant 140DL G2 server with what appears to be an IDE > > drive in non-DMA mode. Performance on the server is extremely bad > > when large amounts of disk activity is taking place. > > > > I think the problem is that my drive is not in DMA mode: > > > > # hdparm /dev/hda > > This should be /dev/sda and not /dev/hda which means you're most likely > using the generic-ide driver and not ata-piix. > > Google suggests booting with ide0=noprobe ide1=noprobe to make sure the > ata-piix driver is used. > If you don't want to reinstall then make sure initrd contains the > ata-piix driver and that references to /dev/hd* are replaced with > /dev/sd* in fstab etc. > > -tgc Timing is everything ! I found the exact same problem on a HP Proliant ML110 at the exact time I read this. Adding the ide0=noprobe to grub.conf instantly solved the problem. fstab picked it up itself without any changes and the disks now show up as sda. The 'hdparm -t <disk> went from 3.6 MB/s with /devhda to 76MB/s with /dev/sda. This would be a good one for the wiki. (or maybe it's already there, didn't check) So thanks Tom for you answer. Greatly apreciated (here also). Regards, Paul Schoonderwoerd Pollux IT