A [PLUG] for hdparm

Derek Loree derek at infotects.com
Fri Mar 22 21:14:06 UTC 2002


Hi all,

Pardon the pun, but I think the performance gained by some
logical tweaking of hdparm is worth sharing.

First off, this tool does have the ability to scramble your
harddrive beyond recognition -- backup before trying
anything with this tool!

Now the good news, I have an AMD 1.3 Gig with an AMD 761
chipset and a Maxtor 40 Gig drive.  When I initially ran

hdparm -Tt /dev/hda

the buffered read time was pathetic - around 2.2 Meg/s (not
cool for an ATA 100 drive and chipset).

To start gathering information I used

hdparm /dev/hda

and found out that 32-bit was off, as well as dma.  Turning
on 32-bit (the -c3 switch) brought the read time to about
2.5 Meg/s (still not too cool).  Turning on dma
(unspecified, just turning it on with -d1) brought the read
time to 40 Megs/s!!

This is not a typo, almost 20 times faster!!  Since the
drive itself is not capable of pulling data off its platters
at the nominal 100 Meg/s, I think I'm going to stop here.

I did try the unmaskirq setting (-u1), but had a total
system lock-up trying to startx.

It seems to me that the 32-bit and the dma settings are
pretty much no-brainers, no reason not to try them.  Mozilla
sure does load faster now.

Again, exercise caution when using this tool, always backup
everything.

Good Luck

Derek Loree






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