[Bioclusters] Disk optimization for blast

[Borries Demeler]

> 
> Dear All,
> We would like to know if there are parameters in the disks setting that 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    = 16 (on)
>  IO_support   =  1 (32-bit)
>  unmaskirq    =  0 (off)
>  using_dma    =  1 (on)
>  keepsettings =  0 (off)
>  readonly     =  0 (off)
>  readahead    =  8 (on)
>  geometry     = 15017/255/63, sectors = 241254720, start = 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