big Problem with FC 4 and SATA (hdparm error)

[spmirowski]

    Hi,

    i use a SATA Harddisk (Seagate 120GB) with Fedora Core 4.

    Everything in the System is up to date (yum).

    When i do this: hdparm -tT /dev/sda

    I get the following error:

    /dev/sda:
    Timing cached reads: 1944 MB in 2.00 seconds = 971.94 MB/sec
    HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(null) (wait for flush complete) failed: Inappropriate
    ioctl
    for device
    Timing buffered disk reads: 170 MB in 3.01 seconds = 56.51 MB/sec
    HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(null) (wait for flush complete) failed: Inappropriate
    ioctl
    for device

    Its not very fast and the error message is not so good i think.

    What can i do to solve the Problem?

    I also tried FC 4 on different Mainboards with different SATA
    Harddisk. Same
    error every time.

    On FC3 with SATA there are no Problems! Downgrading is not possible.

    I hope someone can help me?!

    Thank you very much!

    regards
    Sebastian

I first found this bug around kernel 2.6.6 or so.  I believe
it didn't go away until 2.6.13 for me.  With the bug, my buffer
disk reads went down 10 MB or so.  I never actually noticed
any difference in speed, it might have been just a bad benchmark.
Advice I received was never use hdparm for testing if you want
quality results.  I don't really know much more about the topic.

Stephen