[ltp] hdparm settings?

[Nathan Kurz]

On Fri, Feb 18, 2005 at 03:54:35PM +0800, Senectus . wrote:
> Do any of you guys play with your hdparm settings?
> If so what would you consider "safe" tweaks...?

I haven't done much playing with my current laptop (an X30) but I've
done so in the past.  My general conclusions (for older models using
much older kernels) were pretty simple.  I'm still going by those
simple conclusions with pretty good results.

1) Make sure you are using DMA to transfer (-d 1)
2) Set the sleep spindown to what you want (-S 12 for me)
3) Test with 'hdparm -t /dev/hda' to confirm nothing horribly wron.
4) The rest will probably be autosensed correctly.

This is what I currently get on the X30 with a 40 Gig drive:
# hdparm -t /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
 Timing buffered disk reads:   60 MB in  3.05 seconds =  19.67 MB/sec

If anyone has anything that contradicts this, do tell!

Nathan Kurz
nate@verse.com