Tuning HD's

[Stan Bubrouski]

On Fri, 2003-12-19 at 17:26, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 19, 2003 at 03:01:10PM -0500, Stan Bubrouski wrote:
> > is dying, just like my other 3y/o 40gb drive did a little over a month
> > ago).  Using hdparm or whatever what would be the best settings to
> > optimize performance for this drive?
> 
> For any vaguely modern drive you will get the best performance by just 
> plugging it in. ATA has rather baroque but functional abilities to negotiate
> good settings.
> 

I completely disagree here.  I recently had to plug-in a 120 GB drive to
replace one that failed in my system and I found some site with a hdparm
string for dell laptops and for kicks tried that (i wasn't worried about
the HD at that point because I was still playing around) and I found it
almost doubled the throughput (according to hdparm -t /dev/hda on rh8)
and these were settings for a laptop HD in a dell latitude.  Just
plugging in a drive on my system at least does not yield nearly optimal
performance, which is why I posted this message.  Is there any site that
has a list of best settings for different drives under linux? (And no
I'm not trying to sound combative :)

> One thing that you may want to do is measure the speed of different bits of
> the disk (split it into a load of partitions and measure the I/O rate of each,
> you'll find they vary)
> 

That seems a bit time consuming, but since I'm out of class for break I
could give it a try, but how about being more specific?  I'm not
comfortable just trying things in the hdparm man page since a lot of the
stuff is a little over my head in terms of what I know about newer
hardware.  I've really gotta study up on this stuff again.

-sb