[PlanetCCRMA] NEWBIE: Tuning SATA Disks

Bill Polhemus bill@polhemus.cc
Fri Dec 8 15:17:01 2006


Hi, there. I'm a newbie in just about every sense of the word--except I 
have been using Linux for some time.

I have been intending to put together a "hobbyist" digital audio 
workstation for some time, ever since I stumbled across Planet CCRMA a 
couple of years ago. Thank goodness, now that I'm ready to move forward 
on that front, you've "yummified" the repositories so that I actually 
was able to figure out how to get the whole thing onto my new machine 
running FC5 with not a lot of difficulty.

In the "how-tos," you mention "tuning the hard disks." I have a pair of 
brand-new 160GB Maxtor SATA HDs that FC5 has set up as a single virtual 
volume under LVM. However, the "tuning" procedure described in the docs 
seems relevant for EIDE disks, not SATA.

Aside from "read-ahead," the other recommended settings using HDPARM 
don't seem to work with the SATA disks. Has anyone had experience with 
tuning SATA disks?

Thanks in advance.