hdparm...

[Jair-Rohm]

High;   I followed a thread for a while concerning mp3 playback performance on Linux boxes. Benno suggested using 'hdparm' to tune EIDE hard disks. I am running Red Hat 6 on a p133 laptop with 16 megs of ram. I use sox, MixViews, Cecilia, snd and BladeEnc for mp3 encoding. My mp3 player is X11Amp. To date, i've not had any problems with resources. Surfing with Netscape while processing a file in Cecilia and having a couple of terms open presents no strain. Things run smoothly. Which leads me to the question, "...hmmm...can things be better?". The man page for 'hdparm' mentions something about use of the '-m' option potentially resulting in "...massive filesystem corruption." This of course if your EIDE drive "lies" about its support for multiple mode.   Anyone have any experience with this?   Thanks