Tuning IDE hard disks using hdparm

As per the man page: hdparm provides a command line interface to various hard disk IO controls codes supported by the Linux device driver sub system. The command to get an idea of how well the sub system is working is hdparm -Tt /dev/hda. This will perform a buffer read and a disk read to help get a benchmark of how well your system is working currently. The command hdparm /dev/hda will tell how hdparm is addressing your drive. I've found two sites with some good info on working with hdparm. The first is the USA Linux Users group and the second is on the O'Reilly DevCenter.com site.