22/03/2009
Severely degraded harddisk performance on sata_sil by athcool
I am writing this post to provide some statistics on athcool + sata_sil usage. The results are horrible.
Athcool is a small utility, enabling/disabling Powersaving mode for AMD Athlon/Duron processors.
The homepage of the utility has a big fat warning as well:
WARNING: Depending on your motherboard and/or hardware components, enabling powersaving mode may cause:
* noisy or distorted sound playback
* a slowdown in harddisk performance
* system locks or instability
The Gentoo ebuild also has these warnings:
ewarn “WARNING: Depending on your motherboard and/or hardware components,”
ewarn “enabling powersaving mode may cause:”
ewarn ” * noisy or distorted sound playback”
ewarn ” * a slowdown in harddisk performance”
ewarn ” * system locks or unpredictable behavior”
ewarn ” * file system corruption”
ewarn “If you met those problems, you should not use athcool. Please use”
ewarn “athcool AT YOUR OWN RISK!”
Ignoring all these warning I was using athcool for years on my old desktop box filled with 2 IDE disks. Never had any real problem at all, except for a some performance loss. The problem appeared when I first used a sata disk on motherboard’s, Gigabyte GA-7VAXP-A Ulta, sata controller which uses the sata_sil module.
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Filed by kargig at 10:47 under Gentoo,Linux
Tags: athcool, bug, bug-report, bugzilla, dd, ext3, Gentoo, IDE, Linux, performance, powesaving, sata, sata_sil, vmstat
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