Comment 715 for bug 500069

Oleg: Unfortunatly no clear steps. If you read my comment #513 you'll see that I didn't have any troubles with whole disk software raid10. After that I thought that it was something file-system related but I tested ext2-ext4 and xfs and this is also answering your question Zenith. Same thing, no matter what.

   And regarding the Hardware it may be that this particular HD is broken and in the case of Kostadinov I even think it is a broken hardware problem because on one system (Fedora) it worked and then after using Knoppix and getting back to Fedora it didn't. I'm just mentioning which troubles we had with the green WDs, and not only under linux, until I read about this fdisk thing. Now I have two of them and they didn't give me any troubles when I had them in the whole disk RAID10 or when I had an older kernel, or now with the new kernel setting.

   But to get backto the substance again. Yes, if you go into dd-ing multiple RAM onto HD the system is coming to a halt. With the old kernels it was "I'm doing dd and the system automagically knows that firefox or mail or whatever is of more priority to me than dd, so he slows down dd a bit so firefox could get some time reading from the HD. Or maybe the queing was more fairly so all processes got some time raping the HD, I don't know, I'm not a kernel developer. I'm just a user and as a user I'm mentioning the diffs between the old and the new kernels." With the new kernel it's not it's he who's writing has all the power over the HD. But again that is more a perception than a fact.

   The difference I have to earlier, before I configured vm, is that wa was up to 98 and now it's up to max 45-50.