experience with hdparm

[Robert Brockway]

On Sat, 15 Apr 2006, Dominic Bonfiglio wrote:

> hi,
>
> has anyone tried to speed up their linux system using hdparm? any luck?
> any risks?

I did a talk on this at TLUG a couple of years back.  There are some risks 
associated with non-standard IDE interfaces and chipsets.  I've never had 
data loss despite using hdparm on a regular basis.  Having said this, I 
always backup before playing with hdparm.

I did crash a box once when I enabled DMA - it was writing to disk at the 
time.  This was an experiment :)

Here are the settings I have on one box at the moment.  This is pretty 
typical:

/sbin/hdparm -a8 -c1 -d1 -k1 -m16 -u1 -W1 /dev/hda

Experimentation is often required for ideal settings.

You can do speed testing on the disks with hdparm and also with bonnie++

Always always always back up before tweaking parameters using hdparm or 
speed testing once you have tweaked the parameters.

Rob

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