I recently learned of a program called hdparm and how it optimizes Disk
access. I have a UDMA 66 Motherboard and a 7200RPM 27Gig Quantum HD(None of
other distros can access all filesystems on it).
I tested my drive for speed with hdparm -tT /dev/hda and got 4.75MB/sec.
My next step was figuring out good settings to go with that, I ended up with
hdparm -a128 -m16 -d1 -X68 and a speed of 23.5MB/sec. Next thing I did was I
put it in rc.sysinit and booted with it. After the boot I ran it and got the
old 4.75MB/sec. I found out that there is an hdparm command in
mandrake_everytime script so I commmented it out and my system started booting
4x as fast as before.
My question is, why does Mandrake 7.0 and latest 7.1cooker run an hdparm that
doesn't speed up the drive?This makes linux a lot slower than it could be. I
think this would matter greatly for web-server performance and desktop
boot/fscking times. Can you improve that? I don't know what other distros do,
but it certanly seems possible to have a list of HD models and hparm settings
that correspond with them.
PS
Mandrakeuser.org article claims that it is possible to get 30MB/sec from IDE
drives. Can someone suggest the hdparm settings that the person used. I
suspect that my HD is capable of going that fast under linux.
Taras
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