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Hdparm

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Hdparm

hdparm is a command line utility for the Linux and Windows operating systems to set and view SATA and IDE hard disk hardware parameters. It can set parameters such as drive caches, sleep mode, power management, acoustic management, and DMA settings.

Installation

Root terminal 48px.png
# pacman-g2 -S hdparm


Checking DMA activation

Start to collect the informations about your drive :

Root terminal 48px.png
# hdparm -I /dev/hda


Note Note: Of course hda can be different (maybe sda) depending of your hardware disposition.

In priority check the section Capabilities concerning DMA. For example we have :

 DMA: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5 udma6

The star next to udma5 indicate that this hard drive support DMA, and if the DMAis enabled, it will be in mode UDMA 5.

Now check if the DMA is activated :

Root terminal 48px.png
# hdparm -d /dev/hda


You should have a result like that :

 /dev/hda:
 using_dma = 1 (on)

Here, DMA is activated. However, sometime DMA cannot be enabled (using_dma = 0),in that case see the following section of this page.


Activating DMA

If your drive can support DMA and this one is not enabled, so you have to do it, you'll gain some performances :

Root terminal 48px.png
# hdparm -d1 /dev/hda


Note that command is take in count only after rebooting your system

Testing performances

Root terminal 48px.png
# hdparm -tT /dev/hda


Example of results:

 /dev/hda:
  Timing cached reads:   420 MB in  2.01 seconds = 209.37 MB/sec
  Timing buffered disk reads:  108 MB in  3.00 seconds =  35.99 MB/sec

Check which mode is used

Root terminal 48px.png
# hdparm /dev/hda


Example of results:

 /dev/hda:
  multcount     = 16 (on)
  IO_support    =  1 (32-bit)
  unmaskirq     =  1 (on)
  using_dma     =  1 (on)
  keepsettings  =  0 (off)
  readonly      =  0 (off)
  readahead     = 256 (on)
  geometry      = 16383/255/63, sectors = 156368016, start = 0
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