hdparm is an open source, command-line, performance and benchmarking utility to set and view ATA hard disk drive hardware parameters. It can set parameters such as drive caches, sleep mode, power management, acoustic management, and DMA settings.
The main use of hdparm is enabling irq-unmasking and IDE multiplemode.
GParted and Parted Magic both include hdparm.
Key Features
- Query and dump information regarding drive configuration settings which can be disabled by the vendor or OEM installer.
- Display the drive geometry (cylinders, heads, sectors), the size (in sectors) of the device, and the starting offset (in sectors) of the device from the beginning of the drive.
- Get / Set sector count for filesystem (software) read-ahead – improve performance in sequential reads of large files, by prefetching additional blocks in anticipation of them being needed by the running task.
- Get / Set Advanced Power Management feature.
- Get / Set (E)IDE& 32-bit I/O support.
- Get / Set the “using_dma” flag for the drive.
- Enable / Disable the on-drive defect management feature, whereby the drive firmware tries to automatically manage defective sectors by relocating them to “spare” sectors reserved by the factory.
Website: sourceforge.net/projects/hdparm
Support:
Developer: Mark Lord
License: BSD license
hdparm is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Handy Hard Disk Utilities | |
|---|---|
| NVMe-CLI | NVM-Express user space tooling |
| Smartmontools | Control and monitor storage systems using S.M.A.R.T. |
| scrutiny | WebUI for smartd S.M.A.R.T monitoring |
| openSeaChest | Perform various operations on SATA, SAS, NVMe, and USB storage devices |
| GSmartControl | Graphical user interface for smartctl |
| hdparm | Tune hard disk parameters for high performance |
| sg3_utils | Utilities that send SCSI commands to devices |
| sdparm | Accesses SCSI device parameters |
| nwipe | Secure disk eraser |
| Bonnie++ | Toolkit for testing hard drive and file system performance |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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