On Wed, 15 Aug 2001 11:50:52 -0500 (CDT) "Yaron" <jethro at freakzilla.com> wrote: > Hey, > > On Wed, 15 Aug 2001, Bill Layer wrote: > > > performance. I arrived at these settings through trial-and-error): > > How do you do the trial? (: Read the article... tells all about it... that is why I went and searched it out again. But the basic procedure is to establish the starting point by running hdparm -Tt /dev/hd? and recording those figures. Then start making intelligent guesses, changing parameters with hdparm and re-running the -Tt benchmark to see which combination of parameters get you the best performance, while remaining stable. Interesting to note: while Linux does NOT use the BIOS after boottime, the BIOS settings for hard disk modes, etc are retained by the drives themselves after boot. My (very recent) BIOS puts the drives in the proper PIO mode at boottime, so I make no PIO/UDMA mode / speed changes in my hdparm command: d1 and u1 enable DMA and interrupt-unmasking, respectively. Your best setup may be a combination of BIOS / hdparm modes like mine, or not. But again, read the article.. you can cause NASTY problems, crashes, data loss etc if you make a bad move. -.bill.layer.- -.those who are talking don't know, and those who know aren't talking.- -.frogtown.- -.minnesota.- -.u.s.a.-