Disk IO Speed

[J.D.]

I'm running the Jas 10.4.6 on VMware WS 5.5, on an older P4 2GHz Machine. It isn't exactly fast, but I only have 512m ram, allocating 256 to VMWare OSX. I guess I should be happy that it works...

 

It is on an Abit BG7 MB, with UDMA drive.

 

OSX seems to be using the AppleIntelPIIXATA.kext driver for this drive, which sounds correct I suppose, but I was wondering how I know if it is using UDMA and not PIO mode?

 

I recall when installing OSX a Vmware popup said it was using some older disk access method, but maybe that was because it used the Generic ATA driver while installing, but now uses IntelPIIXATA after install? I'm not sure.

 

In XBench, I get some pretty bad numbers with 4k blocks:

 

Results 22.58   
	System Info	 
			Xbench Version		  1.2
			System Version		  10.4.6 (8I1119)
			Physical RAM			256 MB
			Model		   ADP2,1
			Drive Type			  VMware Virtual IDE Hard Drive
	CPU Test		31.80   
			GCD Loop		43.92   2.32 Mops/sec
			Floating Point Basic	49.96   1.19 Gflop/sec
			vecLib FFT	  25.17   830.28 Mflop/sec
			Floating Point Library  23.12   4.03 Mops/sec
	Disk Test	   17.50   
			Sequential	  17.77   
					Uncached Write  10.64   6.53 MB/sec [4K blocks]
					Uncached Write  53.71   30.39 MB/sec [256K blocks]
					Uncached Read   10.38   3.04 MB/sec [4K blocks]
					Uncached Read   62.08   31.20 MB/sec [256K blocks]
			Random  17.24   
					Uncached Write  6.39	0.68 MB/sec [4K blocks]
					Uncached Write  33.80   10.82 MB/sec [256K blocks]
					Uncached Read   39.44   0.28 MB/sec [4K blocks]
					Uncached Read   48.53   9.01 MB/sec [256K blocks]

 

Any hints on how to speed things up?