Hard Drive Speed

[Alan Cox]

(some additional suggestions to go with your very good summary)

> There isn't really any way of improving the speed of a SATA drive - they 
> should run at top speed already. If you used IDE drive, there might've 
> been some settings to tweak for maximum throughput - but with SATA those 
> are moot (and no, IDE is not faster than SATA :)

Picking drives with NCQ is enormously helpful.

> * high-end HDs, e.g. 10,000+ RPM. These can improve your performance 
> somewhat, in the range of 10-20% - but it stacks on top of performance 
> gain of alternate filesystems. This is probably the cheapest upgrade path.

Also more but smaller disks. 8 40 GB disks have much better seek
behaviour than a single 320GB disk. They also take up a lot of room and
power 8(

> * if you want to go all out, try getting a RAM drive. You insert 
> standard computer RAM into it and your computer sees it as an HD. Very 
> fast and very expensive (cost of RAM)

If possible just stick the extra RAM in the PC and tune it to cache a lot
or use tmpfs. Main memory is much better connected to the CPU than SATA
ram disks.

Alan