hdparm

Ever since my hard drive failed and I replaced it, I’ve been dissappointed. The old drive, a 20 GB IBM Travelstar, was fast and quiet. The new drive, a 60 GB Toshiba, has been slow as hell and loud.

I should clarify, though. By slow as hell, I mean not that the drive itself is slow as hell but that my computer has been slow as hell ever since I installed it. Any sort of bulk disk access brings my interface to a halt while my system drowns in what I presume can only be a flood of interrupt requests. For example, when copying a 1 GB file over my 100 Mbit LAN, my computer will freeze every 2 megabytes or so for about 10 seconds of intense disk activity. Needless to say I’ve been avoiding copying large files around.

I’ve been assuming that perhaps this new drive has less cache on it than the old one, and that I’d need to install the low latency patches for the linux kernel in order to have a useable system. Ugh.

But then in a moment of inspiration, I remembered hdparm. I hadn’t thought of it before because I never needed to use it on the old drive. However, as soon as I tried it on the new drive I was shocked. The default settings with 16-bit transfer mode with DMA disabled. As soon as I turned on DMA, 32-bit transfers, and multi-sector I/O, my problems were gone.

Now my user interface is responsive no matter what I’m doing with the disk. Copying files over my LAN is once again a network-bound, not disk-bound, process.

Now, if only I could figure out how to get rid of the damn noise.