[SOLVED] How do I tune hard drives in Mageia ...

[ghmitch]

I would like to enable multi-sector reads on all of my hard drives. If I do this with hdparm, it will need to be redone at each boot. There is a config file "harddisks" in /etc/sysconfig but apparently nothing reads this file on boot? How do I acheive enabling multi-sector reads on every boot? Thanks!

[nigelc]

Hello,
I haven't used hdparm, but in the man page it says``:
Files: /etc/hdparm.conf

http://linux.die.net/man/8/hdparm

[ghmitch]

Well ... Mageia (at least Mageia 3) puts that file in /etc/sysconfig/harddisks and editing that file doesn't seem to have any effect. The problem with hdparm itself is that as soon as you reboot the system reverts to its default hard drive IO parameters which default to multi-sector IO "off". I want to be able to turn this on and KEEP it on. But thanks very much for responding. - George

[djennings]

The script /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit which runs at boot uses /etc/sysconfig/harddisk to set up the hard drives.

If this is not being respected then it is probably something else changing it again later on in the boot process.

You could try putting your hdparm command in /etc/rc.d/rc.local commands here will be executed at the end of the boot process.

[ghmitch]

Thanks for this added information. It is VERY useful. In my case I am using Mageia 3 Beta 4, which is now pretty much completely on systemd, so the old "rc" files are gone forever. But this information will be add help in sorting out my problem. I realized after posting this question that it probably should have been posted in the Cauldren forum in the first place. But, again, thanks for the explanation. Unfortunately though, I have just discovered that multi-sector reads are NOT supported by libata (SATA drives) and enabling it can cause major problems including disk failure. Hopefully a warning on this ends up in the config file when it is ported to systemd! Of course perhaps this is already working under systemd and the system was just protecting me. - George