Topic: hdparm and secondary IDE Channel

[Dan Williams]

Hello,
Has anyone experiented with the hdparm enable on secondary IDE channel?
Specifically I am interested to know if it improves ide tape drive or cd-rom performance.
Most of my configs have IDE hard drive on primary IDE and CD-ROM and Tape Drives on Secondary IDE.
Thanks for any comments.
Also, is it acceptable to just uncomment in /etc/sysconfig/harddisks
to enable?
Dan

[Kelvin]

Hi Dan,

Don't know about CD-ROM but with a Sony IDE AIT1 drive, there is an improvement. However, I note that enabling dma access for the tape drive on *some* occasions have introduced intermitten backup problems (hard to replicate - no pattern that I've been able to establish). Other times it works perfectly. I had to turn off dma access for the problematic ones and leave it on for the ones that are not having problems.

Kelvin