Speed boost For Linux

So while searching around Digg I found this nifty article here, which gives you three different ways you can speed up your Linux system. Personally I found that article a little advanced for me but decided to try and figure it out and fool around anyway. So I will try and explain and cut out some things here on my blog for one of the ways to speed up your system.

So firstly lets open up a terminal, and type:

sudo hdparm -t /dev/hda

This command will do a test and give you your hard drive transfer speed. When I first did mine, My results were as follows:



/dev/hda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 54 MB in 3.16 seconds = 17.10 MB/sec

So my transfer speed was about 17.10 mb/sec. So lets remember that number and we will do another test after the speed enchantment and see what happens. SO next try this command in terminal:

sudo hdparm -i /dev/hda

This will give you a really confusing output, so for example here was mine:

/dev/hda:

Model=ST380011A, FwRev=3.06, SerialNo=5JV6492K
Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec Fixed DTR>10Mbs RotSpdTol>.5% }
RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=4
BuffType=unknown, BuffSize=2048kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=off
CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=156301488
IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:240,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
PIO modes: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5 udma3 udma4 *udma5
AdvancedPM=no WriteCache=enabled
Drive conforms to: ATA/ATAPI-6 T13 1410D revision 2: ATA/ATAPI-1 ATA/ATAPI-2 ATA/ATAPI-3 ATA/ATAPI-4 ATA/ATAPI-5 ATA/ATAPI-6

* signifies the current active mode

So when you get this big mess look through it untill you find somethign that says, "MaxMultSect=16" Yours might not necessarily =16 but thats ok. If your wondering what that actually means the website I am getting this from says;

The multcount parameter shows how many sectors can be read in a single operation

So that is what it means, so next I ran:



sudo hdparm -m16 /dev/hda



I believe the m16 is what you change to how many sectors so if your max thing wasn't 16 then change this number before you input the command. So after this one little change I ran the test we did in the beginning and my results were a pretty decent improvement. I went from17mb/sec to now 33.9mb/sec!!!!

So that was a pretty nice speed boost, not sure how much I will feel it though, maybe I will write more later and share if I felt much of anything, but if you liked that and want more or others check out the site I got that one from here.