Using Hdparm I found out that my harddrive only supports up to 8sectors/interrupt (-m8, no -m16 or 32).. I knew this computer was cheap 😐 There might be something in the BIOS to change that but my uptime just hit 100 days so I want to keep that! I did enable 32 bit access (-c1), dma was already enabled (-d1) and the change to 32 bit access almost doubled the score I got from buffered reads (1.7MB/s to 3.0MB/s – I’m running X, Galeon and Kmail too..)
The computer is noticably more responsive! More info available on Google.
