Hard drive very slow under Linux (ThinkPad r51e)

I actually run CentOS Linux on my Thinkpad r51e, everything is OK (including WiFi) except the hard drive and the optical drive, they are extremely slow (i can't watch DVD anymore) because I cannot active UDMA mode for both drives, they are running in PIO only.

Someone has the same problem and maybe the solution ?

 

The utility you want is called hdparm. For info on it, type in "hdparm --help" or "man hdparm" at a console prompt.

To test (as root, or sudo, not sure about CentOS's security structure) you would try typing "hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda" to enable DMA on your hard drive (it may be /dev/sda), and see if that fixes things. Same with /dev/hdb (or hdc, whatever your DVD device is). If those work, see if there's a /etc/hdparm.conf file in your distro. If so, edit that and it should all work out. If not, add the command "hdparm -d 1 /dev/sda" (or whatever you determined to work above) to a startup script that is run as root. Not knowing CentOS, that's as much info as I can really give you.

 

For CentOS, the file should be /etc/sysconfig/harddisks.

 

Thanks. I've never used CentOS.