Benchmarks tests are all fine and good, but they don't tell the whole story. by using hdparm in your init scripting, you increase the performance of the system before too many other apps load.. this way, you are getting absolutely the best perfornace out of your HD hardware as possible.

also, did you run the test in a strict CLI or was it under X?
that can also make a big difference (as X sometimes like to cache to disk at times)..

Just a few notes from the point of view that if it doesn't hurt, it probably helps.


On Fri, 16 February 2001, Rick Rosinski wrote:

> 
> But, what about the benchmark tests that yielded the same results?  Would I 
> be wasting time putting the hdparm commands in the start-up scripts?
> 
> On Saturday 17 February 2001 09:04, you wrote:
> > I use hdparm on the hard drives.
> >
> > command is like this:
> > /sbin/hdparm -c3 (turns on 32 bit transfers)
> >
> > I put ithis command in one of the base init scripts, so that
> > it gets started early in the process (like immediately after kernel
> > loading).
> >
> > generally, it does make some noticeable improvements in how fast programs
> > like X and netscape load.
> >
> > Hawke
> >
> > On Fri, 16 February 2001, Rick Rosinski wrote:
> > > I don't mean to be long-winded, I just want to know if anybody had found
> > > any tricks that makes a noticable difference in the speed of linux
> > >
> > > I am looking for any way to speed up linux.  I have upgraded to the 2.4
> > > kernel, and boot time takes less time.  Great.  If it improves the speed
> > > (and smoothness) of programs in run-time, those hard drives are holding
> > > them back. So, I checked out some old PLUG mail and found stuff about the
> > > hdparm utility (from "linux too slow") and I gave that a shot.  I found
> > > out that my drives were already running in 32-bit mode - because the
> > > benchmark tests yielded the same results.  I used "hdparm -Tt /dev/hda"
> > > to test the drive. Then, I did a "hdparm -c3d1 /dev/hda".  This said that
> > > 32-bit dma was activated.  Then I did hte hdparm -Tt /dev/hda again and
> > > the results were the same.  I have 400 MB ram and two swap partitions
> > > totalling 267,544 MB, and the swap is hardly ever used (using "free" and
> > > "kpm" (KDE Process Manager)). I tried to upgrade to XFree86 4.0.2, but
> > > the compilation forced out a kernel bug in inode.c and that is too scary
> > > to try again (since inode.c is part of the file management system) - and
> > > a crash that forced me to reformat a partition.
> > >
> > > --
> > > Rick Rosinski
> > > http://rickrosinski.com
> > > rick@rickrosinski.com
> > >
> > > ________________________________________________
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> 
> -- 
> Rick Rosinski
> http://rickrosinski.com
> rick@rickrosinski.com
> 
> ________________________________________________
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