# Very bad HDD performance



## alexsc13 (Nov 29, 2011)

Hi,

today I installed FreeBSD 8.2 AMD 64 on a fresh HP Proliant DL120G5 server and the HDD performance is extremely bad.

The active HDD is a:


```
da0 at mpt0 bus 0 scbus0 target 1 lun 0
da0: <ATA Hitachi HUA72201 A3EA> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-5 device
da0: 300.000MB/s transfers
da0: Command Queueing enabled
da0: 953869MB (1953525168 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 121601C)
```

The problem is now that for example *portsnap fetch* and *extract* takes more than 45 minutes and during that time everything else that is being executed on the server lags big time like for example a simple *w* takes more than 5 seconds or a *cat* of any small file also taking a long time. The server load is around 0.02 and there are more than 7GB RAM available.

I have an almost similar server where the HDD's show like this:


```
ad2: 953869MB <MB1000EBNCF HPG0> at ata3-master UDMA100 SATA 3Gb/s
```

On that server everything works perfectly fine, fetching and extracting the ports collection is done in around 5 minutes and nothing else is lagging while doing that.

Does anyone have an idea whats the problem here? I am wondering bout the ad and da doesn't the first mean S-ATA and the second IDE? Is the drive running in a wrong mode? And what does the "Fixed Direct Access" mean?


----------



## SirDice (Nov 30, 2011)

alexsc13 said:
			
		

> I am wondering bout the ad and da doesn't the first mean S-ATA and the second IDE?


da is SCSI and ad is ATAPI (S-ATA and IDE).


----------



## alexsc13 (Nov 30, 2011)

The problem was that the LSILogic ( mpt ) controller disable's write caching per default on SATA drives.

Adding this to /boot/loader.conf fixed the problems.


```
hw.mpt.enable_sata_wc=1
```


----------

