[Hudlug] A hdparm Tweaking Guide

[Rob Shakir]

A Guide to Hard Disk Tweaking

When you run the "hdparm -tT" command you can see the current I/Os from your hard drive benchmarked. 

First run hdparm -tT as root and see what scores you get, preferably post them so I can see how much difference it makes!

There are ways to improve these scores, the best being:

32bit accessing (c)

DMA (d)

Multiple sector count (m)



To enable these:


hdparm -c 1 -d 1 -m 16 /dev/xxx

Where /dev/xxx is your hard drive 

Another important option is the enabling of UDMA 33/66/100. 

Add the -X option, and then this number i.e. (-X 69)



X 33 = Multiword DMA

X 66 = ATA-33 (UDMA2)

X 68 = ATA-66 (UDMA4)

X 69 = ATA-100 (UDMA 5)



People have asked me about ATA-133, Im afraid I dont know how to enable this!

Now, enable the -k 1 option, to allow the settings to be kept over a reboot.

add the whole line to your /etc/rc.local/local.start (in gentoo) to allow these tweaks on bootup.

Happy tweaking! 

Shak

robshakir
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