Hard disks, due to their design and inclusion of moving parts, are a major factor for bottlenecks in current desktops. Most IDE drives support 32-bit transfers, but most distributions default to 16-bit transfers for safety and compatibility purposes. To check whether your hard disk supports 32-bit transfers, issue the following command in a terminal:



Here 'X' is an alphabet determining the disk order. It will be either a, b, c or d for most desktops. It's safe to try out all the options using this command.

If the above command does not output an error message "HDIO_8ET_32BIT failed: Invalid argument", it means that your disk supports 32-bit transfers and the command "hdparm -c3 /dev/sdX" can be added to /etc/rc.local before the "exit 0" line.