Disk Performance

Some tips for increasing disk (I/O) performance under various operating systems.

Linux

Newer technology, SSD are exponentially faster than SATA or SAS

If you must use SATA (or better SAS) you can use multiple disks with mirror-striping RAID10 (1+0) for the best performance + fault tolerance.

Use blockdev to increase the # of read-ahead pages

blockdev --setra 16384 /dev/sda

Get a report of same

sudo blockdev --report  /dev/sda
RO    RA   SSZ   BSZ   StartSec     Size    Device
rw   256   512  4096          0  488259584  /dev/sda

Use sdparm to set/get values from SATA drives...

sdparm --get=WCE /dev/sda
sdparm --set=WCE /dev/sda

Use hdparm to set various performance-enhancing values. Note that SATA drives cannot benefit from these see http://linux-ata.org/faq.html Read http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2000/06/29/hdparm.html to learn all about hdparm and how it's default settings are usually non-optimal

Turn on dma

hdparm -d1 /dev/sda

Set IO_support to use 32-bit (usual default is 16-bit)

hdparm -c3 /dev/sda

Set multicount to 16

hdparm -m16 /dev/sda

Set Write cache enabled (this is equivalent to sdparm --set=WCE above which sometimes fails on older drives)

hdparm -W 1 /dev/sda

Finally, see gobs of information about a drive including the values for settings above.

hdparm -I /dev/sda