How to enable DMA on your hard drive within Linux to speed up ZENworks imaging.

(Last modified: 15Nov2004)

This document (10083494) is provided subject to the disclaimer at the end of this document.

goal

fact

Novell ZENworks for Desktops 3

Novell ZENworks for Desktops 3.2

Novell ZENworks for Desktops 4

Novell ZENworks for Desktops 4.0.1

Novell ZENworks 6

fix

The "hdparm -d1 /dev/hda" does make a huge improvement on imaging speed. Testing shows that a 6GB workstatation image (2GB compressed ZMG image) went from 30+ minutes to download to just under 12 minutes on a Dell GX260.

Also of note, you can simply issue a "hdparm -d1 /dev/hda" at the bash# prior to imaging for the same effect.

If you would like to test before and after results, issue an "hdparm Tt /dev/hda" prior to setting the -d1 and the after -d1 is set. On the Dell GX260, the disk-read performance went from 4.73MB/sec to 40MB/sec.

You can also experiment with the enabling/disabling the on-disk write cache (i.e. -W1 or -W0 with noticeable difference in speed but the hard disk only has a 2MB buffer. With a disk with 8MB+ cache you may see some improvement with -W1 set.

So at the bash# prompt type in:

hdparm -Tt /dev/hda - it will run a test on the speed
then
hdparm -d1 /dev/hda - It will turn on DMA
then
hdparm -Tt /dev/hda - it will run the test again on speed.

You could also enable DMA on your CDROM drive by using the following command:

hdparm -X66 -d1 -u1 /dev/cdrom

note

This may not work or cause adverse effects on hard drives that don't support DMA.

document

Document Title:	How to enable DMA on your hard drive within Linux to speed up ZENworks imaging.
Document ID:	10083494
Solution ID:	NOVL89674
Creation Date:	22May2003
Modified Date:	15Nov2004
Novell Product Class:	Management Products

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