Saturday, April 17, 2010

Hard Disk Performance

I accidentally found a utility today in linux to read/alter technical hard drive parameters. I checked my current drive and as i saw samsung by default had the drive acoustic management setting set to 0

(0 = quiet, 254=speed).

Guess what - i prefer speed over noise ! I changed the value to 254 and got a vast boost in performance ! Viva la linux ! F* uSoft ! :))
Meanwhile, there will be no need to alter any acoustic over performance parameters soon because of the new HDD technology coming out - the Flash based drives, aka SSD (solid state disks)

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5 comments:

  1. johnApril 17, 2010 at 7:55 PM

    can you spare the name of the utility ?
    I plan to use it on Linux Mint running on a particularly old seagate hard disk!
    Thanks !!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Chris Papadopoulos - awechrisApril 18, 2010 at 4:37 PM

    Hello John !
    The name of the utility is hdparm &
    the full command for drive high speed (and high noise :p) is:
    sudo hdparm -M 254 /dev/sdax (x=1,2,3 etc)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Chris Papadopoulos - awechrisApril 18, 2010 at 4:47 PM

    My desktop hdd - a brand new 1,5TB HD154UI from Samsung was also set to 0, so i changed it to 254 too. Now, both desktop and laptop hdd's run at their full speed ! Seems that samsung prefers quiet systems over speedy systems ;)

    ReplyDelete
  4. johnApril 18, 2010 at 5:01 PM

    thanks again !

    ReplyDelete
  5. johnApril 18, 2010 at 5:04 PM

    unfortunately the drive is so old that it doesn't support acoustic management so I can turn it off ...

    ReplyDelete

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