SATA File Copy Slow

[mndar]

I'm getting very slow file transfer rates with my SATA Drives.
I've got 2 Seagate 7200.11 500GB hdds
When copying from one hard drive to another, the transfer speed is just over 10MB/sec. The transfer speed is the same when copying files within the same hdd.
At times it suddenly shoots to 40MB/sec but most of the time its around 10MB/sec
I tried different file systems ext3,reiserfs,fat32 but got the same performance

The weird thing is that hdparm shows the disks capable of much higher speeds

/dev/sdb:
 Timing cached reads:   1490 MB in  2.00 seconds = 744.51 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  308 MB in  3.00 seconds = 102.58 MB/sec

I googled for the issue and seems many have faced similar problems. However none seem to have figured out how to fix it.
I using Fedora 9 on a Intel865 chipset.
I'm facing the same issue with a PC at work running Fedora9 on Intel945
Any pointers ?

[mndar]

No one, huh ?

Please don't bump threads, while waiting for a reply you can use Google...

Wayne

[mndar]

Did a google before starting this thread. Couldn't find a satisfactory answer.
The search goes on though

[stevea]

First can you explain exactly what you do to measure the ~10MBPS rate.
No offense intended, but many ppl don't really understand the consequences of commands.
hdparm is a raw disk read test. It says nothing of writes which are typically slower
and under a file system (like ext3) things are much slower yet. If you got a solid 40MPS I
would think that might be decent.


So have you tried to figure out what is the bottleneck ?
You can test read access time of a directory on one if these disks and ...

dir=/mnt/dir
du -s --si $DIR
time tar -cf /dev/null $DIR


Similarly you can try dd'ing to a file or untaring a tarball from another disk to test write speed,
I'd be very interested in the results as I am interesting in purchasing some 7200.11's

[mndar]

The 10MB/sec rate was obtained while copying a 3.4GB ISO from one disk to another.
The transfer rate hovered around the same while copying multiple files, each of size ~400MB.

I tried the command tar cf /dev/null /disks/sda8/KNOPPIX_V5.1.1CD-2007-01-04-EN but I just got the message
tar: Removing leading `/' from member names