Friday, March 02, 2007

Hard Drive Performance and hdparm

Ok, I don't invest that much cash into my computer. Heck, I haven't purchased new (or used) computer hardware for myself in almost 2 years. My computer is at least 6 years out of date. Its slow.

Well, a RAM stick went out and I am down to 512MB, can we say SWAP???. So I checked out the ouput from hdparm and I had a nasty surprise. 8.59 MB/sec!!!

hdparm to the rescue.

$ hdparm -c3 -m16 -d1 -u1 -X70 -k /dev/hdb

37.99 MB/sec!!!

That should improve performance significantly!

Note: These settings are for a Seagate Barracuda 80GB

$ sudo hdparm -I /dev/hdb
...
ATA device, with non-removable media
Model Number: ST380021A
Serial Number: 3HV291LP
Firmware Revision: 3.19
...

No comments: