Many
people don't
realize they can improve the performance of their
hard-disks under
Linux with a quick
command. For this, I'm supposing you have an
IDE interface.
The first thing to do is:
hdparm /dev/hda
You should see something like this:
/dev/hda:
multcount = 0 (off)
I/O support = 0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq = 0 (off)
using_dma = X
keepsettings = 0 (off)
nowerr = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 8 (on)
geometry = NNNN/NNN/NNN, sectors = NNNNNNN, start = 0
The line that interests us is the one that says:
using_dma = X
If X is "1" chances are there's little room for
improvement. A value of "0" however, means that your
system is not using
DMA to access the
hard-drive. You can obtain a
significant performance improvement of up to 4X with a simple command.
Try first:
hdparm -t /dev/hda
This will tell you how many MB/sec (
megabytes per second) your
drive can
transfer. Now, do:
hdparm -d 1 -k 1 /dev/hda
and repeat the
hdparm -t /dev/hda
command to measure the
performance difference.
In my case, the transfer-rate jumped from 4MB/sec to 17MB/sec. A worthy increase.
After that, all you have to do it to put the command on your rc.local file so it get executed every time the system boots.