I was reading the thread about the HD drive performance and noticed my hard drive is waaay slower than it should be.
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 20.17 seconds = 3.17 MB/sec
It is a HDD Maxtor 20GB 7200 RPM Ultra, athlon 1600mhz and Asus a7v-266e motherboard.

How do i make the drive go faster. I read the HD tweak trick mini howto some time ago and by following it totally phucked my other computer and had to reinstall everything, so im afraid of screwing up badly again with hdparm...
Any help please?
Thanks in advance

-NSKL

that thread is huge, and there is LOTS of tips there about how to make it better. read that properly, and read the hdparm page properly.

OK, i did that, after the tweak i got a HUGE speed increase. Now i wonder why didnt it work on the other comp but caused Kernel panic about drive geometry out of range and i had to re format the drive... Thats why i was afraid to do the tweak again...
OK, all cool now
Thanks!
-NSKL

some chipsets are buggy and fail when unabling DMA. Also, the only two options you need to enable with hdparm are -d 1 and -u 1, (really, -d 1 is the only one that makes a really big difference in most cases). -p should not be messed with. You can gain a modest speed increase at high risk. Also if you look in man hdparm they say that many chipsets require -c 3 and *not* -c 1.

i added
# HD parm speed tweak
echo "Speeding up second hard drive..."
/usr/sbin/hdparm -c 1 -d 1 -k 1 /dev/hdb
echo "done!"
to rc.local and now i get:
64 MB in 1.66 seconds = 38.55 MB/sec
Im quite happy with that, thanks for the info anyway!
-NSKL