Warning. The advice contained in this How To is risky. It might destroy your system. You have been warned!
Many operations on a PC are I/O constrained. In day-to-day operation, my processor rarely reaches 100%, but my hard drive is often struggling to keep up. But, by default, Hoary doesn't use the fastest possible settings for disk access; it's a little safety conscious. On my newish Dell laptop, these tips speed up my hard drive by 60%, noticeably improving system responsiveness. And nothing's crashed... yet.
First find out how fast your hard drive is. Fire up a terminal end enter
Code:
sudo hdparm -t -T /dev/hda
(Change hda for your own hard drive's device number; if you don't know, you're probably not yet ready for this guide). Do this three times, and note the average result.
Now we need to understand the drive's capabilities. Use
Code:
sudo hdparm -i /dev/hda
to tell you. If you're really interested, try
Code:
sudo hdparm -I /dev/hda
to get more details.
First, look for two settings: MultSec and MaxMultSec. According to the manual, "multiple sector mode, is a feature of most modern IDE hard drives, permitting the transfer of multiple sectors per I/O interrupt, rather than the usual one sector per interrupt. When this feature is enabled, it typically reduces operating system overhead for disk I/O by 30-50%. On many systems, it also provides increased data throughput of anywhere from 5% to 50%." Despite this, you'll probably find that MultSec is off, even if it's supported by your drive, as "Some drives claim to support multiple mode, but lose data at some settings. Under rare circumstances, such failures can result in massive filesystem corruption.
If you're willing to risk it - remember, it may not be wise - enter
Code:
sudo hdparm -m <your MaxMultSec value> /dev/hda
Check out your results again, and enjoy the free performance boost.
Now it's time to enable 32-bit I/O. In these days of 64 bit processors, it's a shame to have bits of the system pretending they're in the 1980s - but that's what Hoary seems to do to some drives. Establish the position with
Code:
sudo hdparm -c /dev/hda
If the result is 0, you're still in the dark ages. Cross your fingers, and try this:
Code:
sudo hdparm -c 3 /dev/hda
It worked for me. A final speed check showed my hard drive was 60% faster - and it felt it, too. But if it blew away your system's brains... I did warn you.
Now all I need to do is work out which config file I have to edit to make this happen at boot time. Does anyone know?
Bookmarks