On Friday 02 May 2003 12:49, Borries Demeler wrote: > > Dear All, > > We would like to know if there are parameters in the disks setting th= at > > will accelerate our blast processing. > > We have dual CPU Pentium4 machine with 2 IDE Hard disks 120G. > > Our O.S. is Suse8.1 > > the output of the dhparm is: > > hdparm -v /dev/hda > > /dev/hda: > > multcount =3D 16 (on) > > IO_support =3D 1 (32-bit) > > unmaskirq =3D 0 (off) > > using_dma =3D 1 (on) > > keepsettings =3D 0 (off) > > readonly =3D 0 (off) > > readahead =3D 8 (on) > > geometry =3D 15017/255/63, sectors =3D 241254720, start =3D 0. > > you can pretty much double your IDE performance by running your two > drives in RAID-0 mode using Linux's software raid. In my experience > this works best if you put each drive on a separate IDE port of your > motherboard and also don't hook up IDE CDROMs or zip drives to the same > channel. If you don't have enough IDE ports, you can buy a low cost IDE > RAID card to get some more IDE ports. Hope that helps > > -Borries Thanks, I have the promise FastTrak100 Raid controlled build in on my motherboard= but=20 I have experienced some instabilities with this controller so I went back= to=20 the simple IDE. I thought that the 'readahead' parameter for the hard disk might help. --=20 Bye, Ami.