Boosting performance when a read-only disc is in the drive

James Wilkinson ubuntu at westexe.demon.co.uk
Wed May 4 12:18:07 UTC 2005


Stephen R Laniel wrote:
> That's a different question. My question wasn't whether I
> could increase performance in general. My question was: I
> have a rewritable-CD drive, and I wonder if I could increase
> its performance during read-only activities -- above and
> beyond any performance increases that take effect the rest
> of the time.
> 
> I had in mind things like buffers: if Linux knew that it
> didn't need to keep any write buffers for the drive (I'm not
> sure how such things are implemented, so don't nail me too
> hard if that's an ignorant description of how one implements
> buffers), could that speed things up at all?

Yes, it does.

Linux knows that it won't need any write buffers, and doesn't allocate
them.

In general, on Linux, if there's an optimisation, usually it is either
always a Good Thing and always turned on, or the system will
automatically detect what is best.

The only magic "make my hardware go faster" switches are those that
could break some hardware (or make things unstable, or not work, etc).

In this case, about all you can do is play with hdparm, and play with
the location of your IDE drives (one per cable is ideal: if you can't do
that, try to go for only one device in use at any one time per cable).

Hope this helps,

James.

-- 
E-mail address: james | Space Opera: General term for a subgenre of adventure
@westexe.demon.co.uk  | SF in which the men are heroic, the women beautiful,
                      | the monsters monstrous, and the spaceships make
                      | whooshing sounds in hard vacuum. -- Eric Raymond




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