Comment 23 for bug 119730

Pinepain, it's very kind of you to rtfm me without actually reading my comment, thank you very much. First of all there were no 'a lot of small files' not in any single of my tests. I always used large files, 250-350MB in size. And ntfs is not stone age, it is currently used by my windows partition, and the big file for testing was pagefile.sys (surprising, no? it's also not heavily fragment there). Also never in my tests I actually used to copy to hdd, because then it would be read+write speed (minus a delta because some data would stay in cache), writing data to /dev/null can have a small delta (dependent on buffer size though), but still, difference between 5MB/s and 20MB/s [on the same system with different files, one was downloaded with ktorrent (heavily fragmented and slow), another downloaded with wget (shows excellent throughput, supposedly it's not fragmented)] is not imaginary, don't you think? And I doubt I have a spare connector in my laptop's hard drive bay.

My experience with gutsy (after dist-upgrading from feisty) was extremely crawling and painful under even slightest disk load for past two months (and not just mine I assume, reading relevant bug reports), heavy fragmentation can also explain why people stop experiencing performance problems after they do clean reinstall.

P.S. Yes, I upgraded my bios and found that I do have those options in there, but I don't know if that would help at all, because I wiped my ubuntu installation, sorry. But seeing hdparm -i that I attached above I doubt it, because it shows udma5 is already currently selected mode.