If you're using
Linux, you will also want to do fun stuff with
DMA as well, as enabling this will significantly speed up your hard drive access speeds. However, this being
Linux, it's not
quite as easy as "tick a box". You need to instead get acquainted with the
hdparm command. There's lots of different stuff that you can do with this to improve
IDE performance, but for
DMA you need to do the following:-
hdparm -d1 <drive name>
e.g.
hdparm -d1 /dev/hda
(for obvious reasons you're going to need to be
root for this!)
This needs to be done on each
bootup, so I'd advise putting it on your
/etc/rc.d/rc.local or similar (depending on your particular
distribution)