Comments on: Linux hard drive performance optimization

By: Amber Collins

Amber Collins — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 01:25:17 +0000

If you had to choose between a Seagate, Western Digital, or a Samsung hard drive, which would it be? Which do you consider the most reliable out of them? I had a WD that went to crap on me after about 6 months, so I’m a bit leery of them.

By: KMN

KMN — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:58:33 +0000

hdparm -a1024 /dev/sda
worked for me on compaq presario c700 laptop.

Thanks.

By: Abidoon

Abidoon — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 05:31:15 +0000

Aha! I see. Thanks a lot. I will try this out today and get back to you.

By: C

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 17:54:57 +0000

Errr, there is no holdup. The settings you are trying to change are not used by SATA drives. For example, trying to do -d1 (turn on DMA) is not accepted as SATA do not require this change. (IE: depracated function)

hdparm -v /dev/sda will show your current drive settings.

Typically, about the only thing you can play with is readahead.
So: hdparm -a1024 /dev/sda
This will set read ahead to 1024. (It seems to default to 256 on most Linux distros.) Usually you try 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096… as settings. What works for your machine will depend greatly. On one HP Proliant server the onboard SATA controller, this setting changed nothing. But the ADAPTEC RAID controller in the same box went from 95MB/s to 125MB/s going from -a256 to -a2048 which is not a bad jump.