[PlanetCCRMA] NEWBIE: Tuning SATA Disks

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On Fri, 2006-12-08 at 17:16 -0600, Bill Polhemus wrote:
> 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?

As you have found out there's not much to tune with the newer disks and
Fedora itself chooses better options by default than it was doing a
while back. So don't worry too much about it and start making
noises! :-)

-- Fernando