I guess that my emails are *really* long-winded.  If you read the whole 
thing, you would have found out what my experience was with hdparm.  I 
mentioned this experience in an older message on the same topic earlier this 
morning.  The benchmarking options (-Tt) yielded the same results as the 
first (before -c3d1).  So (unfortunately), hdparm doesn't help me here.  But 
thanks anyway. 

On Saturday 17 February 2001 22:17, you wrote:
> Rick Rosinski wrote:
> > My CPU is an AMD K6-III 400Mhz.  I just want to get the best out of Linux
> > (plus I like to tinker with it).  I am using Slackware 7.1 (but I updated
> > many of the basic utilities and upgraded the kernel to 2.4.1).  I haven't
> > changed anything related to the disk cache and mem buffer (because I
> > don't know how to).  I am afraid of messing with RAM disks only because I
> > tend to forget to copy things back to disk to save important info (but of
> > course, I can implement shut-down or crontab scripts that will do that
> > for me).  I use my system for web administration, with apache, perl and
> > mysql. I also work with large 600 bpi photo images with the gimp.  I do
> > lots of work with sound files, especially encoding wav's to mp3's.   Is
> > there a way to decrease the amount of caching that the system does?   I
> > also tried hdparm -c3d1 and found that my system defaults to 32-bit & dma
> > mode because there was no difference in the benchmark tests (using hdparm
> > -Tt on the drive before and after the -c3d1 switch).  Any more
> > suggestions?
>
> Hi,
> I found this command called hdparm that looks at your hard disk. I found
> that my drive had buffering off and Direct Memory Access(DMA) turned
> off. I don't know what to do armed with this but ...
>
> You could also look at www.linuxdoc.org. They have a section
> HOWTO/Multi-Disk-HOWTO.html that tells how to optimize if you have more
> than disk.
>
> Hope this helps,
> Eric:-)
>
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-- 
Rick Rosinski
http://rickrosinski.com
rick@rickrosinski.com