Tuning HD's

[Alan Cox]

On Fri, Dec 19, 2003 at 03:01:10PM -0500, Stan Bubrouski wrote:
> is dying, just like my other 3y/o 40gb drive did a little over a month
> ago).  Using hdparm or whatever what would be the best settings to
> optimize performance for this drive?

For any vaguely modern drive you will get the best performance by just 
plugging it in. ATA has rather baroque but functional abilities to negotiate
good settings.

One thing that you may want to do is measure the speed of different bits of
the disk (split it into a load of partitions and measure the I/O rate of each,
you'll find they vary)