HOWTO Use hdparm to improve IDE device performance (in Linux).

This has been on my Linux to-do list for a long time, because it shows up in many How To Make Linux Faster documents, as if hdparm were a secret knock that allows only True Linux Geeks to get proper hard drive performance. It turns out that newer Linuxes, you know, the ones that are good at hardware auto-detection, are also good at turning on the optimal hard drive operation modes. Still worth a look, though, just to see a command that dumps statistics about hard drives. (hdparm -Tt /dev/hda benchmarks the drive, for instance.)