[mrtg] Linux IDE Drive Tuning

[Frantsen Christian]

This might help you people out that runs several hundred nodes on IDE
drives.

# /sbin/hdparm -c 1 /dev/hda (or hdb, hdc etc)
to use 32-bit I/O over the PCI bus. (The hdparm(8) manpage says that you may
need to use -c 3 for some chipsets.)

# /sbin/hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda (or hdb, hdc etc)
to enable DMA. This may depend on support for your motherboard chipset being
compiled into your kernel.

You can test the results of your changes by running hdparm in performance
test mode:
# /sbin/hdparm -t /dev/hda (or hdb, hdc etc)

When you've found the optimal settings, you should consider doing a
# /sbin/hdparm -k 1 /dev/hda (or hdb, hdc etc)
to keep these settings across an IDE reset. I've seen the kernel reset the
IDE controller occasionally and if you don't set -k 1, the other
settings will be reset to defaults and you'll lose all your performance
gains.

The -m option can be used to change the number of sectors transferred on
each interrupt. You may get additional gains by tweaking this.

Hope this can help someone =)

Regards
-----------------------------------------
Christian Frantsen
Internoc Scandinavia AB
Tel: +46-36-194843
Fax: +46-36-194651

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