Speed up your Hard Disk Drive

Hard disk drives have a feature named "acoustic drive management".


That management setting controls the noise/performance of the drive. Noise=Performance. Silent operation=low performance.


In order to set your disk-drive to make more noise and get snappier/speedier than being lazy and silent, use the command below in a linux terminal:

sudo hdparm -M 254 /dev/sdb    ← this sets acoustic management sto 254 (fast)


Command analysis:
hdparm <-- the ... command
-M 254 <--- A value of zero gives opium to drive - makes it silent but looses speed. A value of 254 (Max) makes the drive faster but makes more noise.
/dev/sda <--- the hard drive id (master partition)


To view the partitions of your system (in order to decide which drive/s to boost):

sudo cat /proc/partitions 

If you have sda , sda1, sda2, sdb, sdb1, sdb2 in list you have to choose sda or sdb or both.

Note that the setting remains active even if you dual-boot into windows.


If you want to see your hard drive current setting before or after altering it, type:
sudo hdparm -M /dev/sda <-- change /dev/sda to your /dev/sdx drive

From my personal experience (at least with the several drives that i have used) the manufacturers set the acoustic drive management to 0 (that is siiiilent)

That's a 'trick' i'm proud of finding out in order to boost my PCs performance :)

Enjoy !



Note: All commands must be issued in a Linux terminal.