mprove disk performance

If you have a DMA-compatible (Direct Memory Access) hard drive, you can increase data throughput threefold with a simple tweak. This will improve boot times because read times will be reduced, and overall performance will increase whenever the hard disk is accessed.

Start by installing hdparm through your package manager, then fire up a root terminal and type:

hdparm -d1 /dev/hda1

replacing /dev/hda1 with the location of your boot partition to increase startup times or the root partition to increase general performance.