[plug] No net traffic with heavy IDE usage

[Nigel Duff]

On Sat, Apr 21, 2001 at 04:55:37PM +0800, Bill Kenworthy wrote:

> Both cdrom and harddrive are on the same IDE bus? and the driver has

Not always. The cdrom is at /dev/hdd and it still happens burning from
/dev/hdb.

> defaulted to the lowest settings?  try hdparm (set dma mode etc) and get

I knew someone was going to say hdparm(8). For some reason this program
scares me. Hhmm, I've just had another look at the man page. I'm sure it
used to start with a big warning of the damage you could do to your
drives if used incorrectly. 

> another cable and separate the drives onto different busses.  In some
> cases, everything will stop whilst waiting for disks - particularly when
> the cdrom is hogging the bus.  A similar effect occurs if you have a
> harddrive sharing a bus and using cdparanoia to rip poor quality tracks
> - basicly it gets unusable for the duration!  As for the difference
> between Redhat and debian, its possibly the default driver settings,
> hdparm will help if that is the case.  Otherwise get a real distro like
> Mandrake that applies the optimisations out of the box (runs for cover
> ...)

I'm betting that'll be the case (The default settings for hdparm, not
your foolish assertions about Mandrake). :)

Nigel