[ltp] hdparm settings?

[Dave Miller]

Nathan Kurz wrote:

>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
>
>  
>
As lifted from the gentoo handbook:

"Activate Safe Performance Options:  # hdparm -d 1 -A 1 -m 16 -u 1 -a 64 
/dev/hda"

Works just fine on several machines. I suspect a lot of that is 
autosensed anyway, and as Nathan said -d 1 is the important flag.
Can't add anything about the -S setting as I've not tried it

For the record - 40gb 5400 drive in R40e:

# hdparm -tT /dev/hda gives 531.28 MB/sec cache read and 23.31 MB/sec 
buffered disk

Dave Miller