hdparm To No Avail

Strange thing. I wanted to see about boosting the hard drive throughput on my little home fileserver (consisting of three Western Digital WD3200JB 320GB drives) but my hdparm tweaks resulted in no appreciable gains in performance over the default Ubuntu Server settings.

hdparm -X69 -m16 -d1 -c1 -u1 /dev/hda /dev/hde /dev/hdf

Resulting in these custom settings for each drive (as shown here for hda):

/dev/hda:
multcount = 16 (on)
IO_support = 1 (32-bit)
unmaskirq = 1 (on)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
geometry = 38913/255/63, sectors = 625142448, start = 0

hdparm -Tt /dev/hda returns the following with both the default Ubuntu settings and with barely any noticeable difference with my custom settings for each of the three drives:

/dev/hda:
Timing cached reads: 252 MB in 2.01 seconds = 125.24 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 104 MB in 3.01 seconds = 34.57 MB/sec

Based on documents I have read I expected to see a substantial increase in performance over the default settings. I think I will find that it probably has more to do with the limitations of my GA-6VEML mainboard and the Promise Ultra100 TX2 card then the drives...

Tags: hdparm Ubuntu Server WD3200JB