[Techtalk] hdparm ?

Alvin Goats agoats at compuserve.com
Mon Apr 12 22:07:58 EST 2004


hdparm IS dangerous and can really screw up your hard drive if you don't
know what you are doing.

Seagate has some utilities that are a bit nicer to work with for setting
some hard drive paramters, primarily for SCSI drives.

For some people, you can do some optimization on the hd by setting the
drive's default levels, like PIO4, UDMA3, etc. hdparm will also let you
set some of the characteristics of CD drives as well. But you had darn
well better know what you are doing or you may never be able to use the
drive again!

I had a SCSI drive that had an interleave pattern that was optimized for
HP-UX (I got the drive used for a few bucks). To kill the weird
interleave, increase the drives capacity by eliminating reserved sectors
per cylinder adn head, and to optimize it's performance to my system
required using hdparm and the Seagate utilities. Since the drive only
cost a few bucks, no great loss if I screwed up!

Some drives are "dumbed down" to Microsoft standards, hence a drive with
UDMA4 capability may be set to UDMA3. You can sometimes change this with
the BIOS settings, but it doesn't always work. hdparm may be the only
recourse. Just remember, hdparm is DANGEROUS! They AREN'T KIDDING!



Alvin


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