speed up your hard discs

[anyweb]

if you are finding things a little slow maybe dma is not enabled on your hard disc

 

to find out if it is or not, try this command as root (assuming /dev/hda is your hard disc, if not try fdisk -l to find out what is your current hd)

 

[root@localhost ~]# hdparm -d /dev/hda 

/dev/hda:

using_dma    =  0 (off)

 

as we can see here, the hard disc (/dev/hda) is not using DMA, so lets do a quick test before enabling dma.

 

to test the hdd speed try this

 

[root@localhost ~]# hdparm -t /dev/hda 

/dev/hda:

Timing buffered disk reads: 24 MB in  3.26 seconds = 7.36 MB/sec

[root@localhost ~]#

 

ok, now lets enable the DMA transfer mode.

 

Code:

[root@localhost ~]# hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
using_dma    =  1 (on)

 

now check the results of the speed test again

 

[root@localhost ~]# hdparm -t /dev/hda 

/dev/hda:

Timing buffered disk reads: 52 MB in  3.11 seconds =  16.72 MB/sec

[root@localhost ~]#

 

speaks for itself !

 

cheers

 

anyweb

[xDamox]

Hi,

 

Nice little tip there :)but I would like to note that the /etc/sysconfig/harddisk shows this:

 

# Set this to 1 to enable DMA. This might cause some

# data corruption on certain chipset / hard drive

# combinations. This is used with the "-d" option