Re: optimizing the hard drive?

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

Matthew Dalton <matthewd@research.canon.com.au> writes:

> Krzys Majewski wrote:
> > 
> > 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?
> 
> Read this:
> http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2000/06/29/hdparm.html
> 

Thanks. Looks like  it basically does boil down  to trying millions of
random  combinations, except  worse because  according to  the manpage
about half of them may corrupt your filesystems. I've done

hdparm -c 3 -m 16 -d 1

and  this  brought me  up  from  about 3  MB/sec  to  about 17 MB/sec
(according to hdparm -t). I  haven't really noticed the difference yet
but I guess there probably is a noticeable difference. 

Anyway, I'm curious if there's a better way of doing these things than
going through the hdparm manpage weighing an unknown probability of better
performance   vs.   another  unknown   probability   of  a   corrupted
filesystem. Like a webpage that gives the specs for my drive or
explains  the  output  of  hdparm   -i,  for  example.  It  is  really
frustrating to manually specify flags  to a program without having any
understanding of what they really do. 

-chris