ways to speed up hard drive?

[leo5111]

i have a 74 gig raptor wondering is their any tweaks to make it optimised?

[meton_magis]

I know different filesystem formats have different speeds, you may want to check them out. Do note that greater speed usualy comes at the cost of sanity checks such as journaling.

[Bemk]

There are some boot options for the kernel that specify how it uses its cache. It doesn't speed up the drive it self, but may speed up the performance for the tasks it is designed for.

It is the elevator boot option you specify in grub, that sets the algorithm. In some cases, for example web server the option 'elevator=as' may actually speed up apache server by a significant ammount. Just google for the options, and see if there is a useful option for you.

Otherwise you can try to find a more efficient file system, which also can speed things up, though I think EXT is pretty efficient. Trying another device (such as SSD) obviously can't compete with algorithms, but on the same device, chosing the right option can actually deliver you higher disk performance.

[MikeTbob]

If it's an (E)IDE drive check out hdparm
Speeding up Linux Using hdparm - O'Reilly Media
Pay special attention too:

Now before you get too excited, it is worth pointing out that under some circumstances, these commands CAN CAUSE UNEXPECTED DATA CORRUPTION! Use them at your own risk! At the very least, back up your box and bring it down to single-user mode before proceeding.

I have not experienced any data loss yet, but it's different for each machine. You may also see the man pages on your system.

man hdparm