optimizing the hard drive? (fwd)

[Krzys Majewski <majewski@cs.ubc.ca>]

Oh yeah one  more thing. What's all this stuff I've heard about dma66
or udma66 or whatever. The  company that makes my motherboard asked if
I ever got this working under Linux and I said Dunno and they said Oh,
we thought you  were a linux guru and  I said Er, sorry. Is  it like a
fast hard drive thing or what. I want my hard drive to be fast. I want
to record some nice tunes with it and stuff. -chris

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 17:15:08 -0700 (PDT)
From: Krzys Majewski <majewski@cs.ubc.ca>
To: "Debian user list (undigested)" <debian-user@lists.debian.org>
Subject: optimizing the hard drive?

How can I optimize hard drive access? Please tell me I don't
have to try one million random combinations of the various flags
to hdparm. Or is the kernel doing the right thing already?
Possibly relevant bits from dmesg:

VP_IDE: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 39
VP_IDE: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
    ide0: BM-DMA at 0xe000-0xe007, BIOS settings: hda:DMA,
hdb:DMA
    ide1: BM-DMA at 0xe008-0xe00f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA,
hdd:DMA
hda: WDC WD102BA, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
hda: WDC WD102BA, 9779MB w/2048kB Cache, CHS=1246/255/63
Partition check:
 hda: hda1 hda2 < hda5 hda6 hda7 hda8 hda9 >

This drive is supposedly 7200 rpm (according to my receipt).
Can anyone confirm this? Shouldn't that make it blazing fast? 

Hdparm -tT says:

/dev/hda:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:  128 MB in 2.08 seconds = 61.54
MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in 22.28 seconds = 2.87
MB/sec

-chris