Linux and related systems offer plenty of possibilities for fast, efficient and devastating destruction. This document is no exception. With power comes dangers and the following sections describe a few more esoteric issues that should not be attempted before reading and understanding the documentation, the issues and the dangers. You should also make a backup.
The techniques described here are rarely necessary but can be used for very specific setups. think very clearly through what you wish to accomplish before playing around with this.
The hard drive parameters can be tuned using the hdparms
utility. Here
the most interesting parameter is probably the read-ahead parameter which
determines how much prefetch should be done in sequential reading.
Most file systems come with a tuning utility and for ext2fs
there is
the tune2fs
utility. Several parameters can be modified but perhaps
the most useful parameter here is what size should be reserved and who should
be able to take advantage of this which could help you getting more useful
space out of your drives, possibly at the cost of less room for repairing
a system should it crash.