Speed up your IDE/ATA hard drive with hdparm

“NOTE: hdparm does NOT work with SATA drives. The hdparm tool is
a command line only tool, and even though it should be only used by
those who know their systems well, it’s not terribly
difficult to use.

“But why would you want to speed up your drive when modern
drives are already fast enough? Some Linux installations default to
slower defaults which, effectively, slow down your drives. Of
course using such a tool must come with a warning. WARNING: Using
hdparm incorrectly could cause corruption of data.”

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