[mythtv] hdparm question

[Dwaine Garden]

Ryan A. Carris wrote:

> I got MythTV working well, just need some fine tuning of the rest of 
> the system now.  Hopefully, this will be my last question for a while.
>
> I've turned on 32 Bit Access (wow, what a difference) and DMA using 
> hdparm.  It really helps. I have a 80GB WD Special Edition 7200RPM 8MB 
> cache drive.  My video goes from jerky to smooth.
>
> Question, and I think this will help a lot of people:  How do I get 
> 32bit access and DMA set at boot?
>
> I was guessing by changing /etc/fstab, but after reading 
> http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2000/06/29/hdparm.html (a good 
> read,thanks to the person who suggested it here) it indicates that I 
> need to add a script to my /etc/rc.d/*.
>
> Could someone please explain how to do 


Create the following files in /etc/sysconfig/:

harddiskhda
harddiskhdb
harddiskhdc
     etc...
    etc....

Create one file for each harddrive.   Here is an example of one file:

# These options are used to tune the hard drives -
# read the hdparm man page for more information

# Set this to 1 to enable DMA. This might cause some
# data corruption on certain chipset / hard drive
# combinations. This is used with the "-d" option

USE_DMA=1

# Multiple sector I/O. a feature of most modern IDE hard drives,
# permitting the transfer of multiple sectors per I/O interrupt,
# rather than the usual one sector per interrupt.  When this feature
# is enabled, it typically reduces operating system overhead for disk
# I/O by 30-50%.  On many systems, it also provides increased data
# throughput of anywhere from 5% to 50%.  Some drives, however (most
# notably the WD Caviar series), seem to run slower with multiple mode
# enabled. Under rare circumstances, such failures can result in
# massive filesystem corruption. USE WITH CAUTION AND BACKUP.
# This is the sector count for multiple sector I/O - the "-m" option
#
#MULTIPLE_IO=16

# (E)IDE 32-bit I/O support (to interface card)
#
#EIDE_32BIT=3

# Enable drive read-lookahead
#
#LOOKAHEAD=1

# Add extra parameters here if wanted
# On reasonably new hardware, you may want to try -X66, -X67 or -X68
# Other flags you might want to experiment with are -u1, -a and -m
# See the hdparm manpage (man hdparm) for details and more options.
#
EXTRA_PARAMS=





Thats it.  you can add whatever parameters to the file that hdparm will 
except.

Dwaine.