[paranoia] dae speed on plextor cdrw

[Sami Farin]

On Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 04:18:40PM -0800, Chad Carr wrote:
> > Can you show "hdparm -i" output for your Plextor and LiteOn
> > after ripping?
> > And if you have chipset-specific file (like "piix") at /proc/ide,
> > can you show it, too...
> 
> Thanks very much for your assistance.  Please find attached
> hdparm_i_liteon.output, hdparm_i_plextor.output and proc_ide_via.output.  Both
> of the cdroms are plugged into the via controller, hdc and hdd, respectively.
> I am not using them to rip at the same time.

good ;)

> > Have you seen messages "DMA disabled" or anything now that you
> > use the ide-akpm patch?
> > Do you get the "old speed" when you disable DMA with hdparm?
> 
> I never got those messages.  Where would I be looking for them?  In dmesg?

Yes. If you haven't seen such msgs, good.

> I do go right back to the "old speed" if I remove DMA.  Also, I am setting "-c1
> -u1" in addition to "-d1" with hdparm.

-c is not needed
-d1 is done by the chipset driver (if CONFIG_IDEDMA_AUTO is enabled)
-u1 chipset driver takes care of this

> After some more extensive testing, I realize that when I said that the Plextor
> became "twice as slow" (I believe I even underlined it) this was not true.  It
> is still slower but not as bad as I had originally reported.  With new and more

"twice as slow" sounded bad, yes.

> methodical testing, I got the following results (ranked highest to lowest) with
> the Plextor on an audio CD with 326132 sectors (approx 72 min):
> 
> no DMA/no paranoia - 282s (15.42x)
> with DMA/no paranoia - 323s (13.46x)

is your IDE bus running at 33 MHz?

> with DMA/with paranoia - 675s (6.44x)
> no DMA/with paranoia - 676s (6.43x)
> 
> Also, just a question, is sectors per second deterministic if I don't use
> paranoia?  Or can it vary based upon the CD I am using?  I know that a longer

Depending on CD's physical condition, reading speed can vary.
Also CDR/CDRW makes a difference. (This is what I _think_.)
So try ripping a very scratchy CD without paranoia to really find out.

> CD is going to push up the average speed since the outside spins faster
> (relative to the head) than the inside, but other than that, are there
> differences between disks?
>
> > And have you played with this jumper?
> > http://www.plextor.com/english/news/dmajumper.html
> 
> I heard about this, but heard that DMA is enabled by default, and since the

Yep, UDMA33 is enabled by default with that Plextor... so I assume
you haven't touched that jumper. I think you don't need to, either.

> kernel seems to recognize it as a DMA device on boot...okay I was lazy.  I'll
> try it.
> 
> > I happened to see akpm on IRC and I asked about this Plextor "issue",
> > he said "with IDE and CDROMs, anything is possible." :)
> 
> From now on, only scsi for me.

Speaking of IRC, Andre Hedrick said
"in two years or less SCSI will be dead and gone"
;)

Speaking of Andre, he has been working on these for 20 months:
http://www.us.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/hedrick/
Not sure if these patches will have any difference on Plextor ripping
speed, but you never know :)

> > I don't know if updating firmware makes Plextor any faster for you.
> > Here are the relevant links, though:
> > http://www.plextor.be/English/technical/firmware.html#2410A-103
> > http://www.plextor.be/download/ftp1/W2410A103.zip
> > http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/firmware.html
> 
> I'll check this out.

Don't bother, your firmware is 1.03 already.

...

>  Model=LITEON DVD-ROM LTD163D, FwRev=GHR2, SerialNo=
>  DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 *udma2 
                                            ^
>  Model=PLEXTOR CD-R PX-W2410A, FwRev=1.03, SerialNo=945400
>  DMA modes: sdma0 sdma1 sdma2 mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 *udma2
                                                              ^

UDMA33 reported...

...
> -------------------drive0----drive1----drive2----drive3-----
> Transfer Mode:       UDMA       PIO       PIO       PIO
                                            ^^^       ^^^

...hmm, forget those, if hdparm -v /dev/hdc says "using_dma=1",
dma is being used... but it doesn't mean that PIO can _not_ 
be used when requested.

<p><p>
-- 
Safari - safari at iki.fi - PGP key 0x427E7914 - http://iki.fi/safari/
  The UNIX Guru's View of Sex: "unzip ; strip ; touch ; finger ; \
  mount ; fsck ; more ; yes ; umount ; sleep"

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