Disk Performance Tuning
From Noah.org
Disk Performance Tuning
On my laptop I use ext3. My fstab is setup for speed. I turn off atime which stop tracking of when files are accessed (still tracks create and write times).
I set the mode to journal_data_writeback. This basically means that data may be written to the disk before the journal. The data consistency guarantees are the same as the ext2 file system. The downside is that if your system crashes before the journal gets written then you may loose new data -- the old data will magically reappear. This is still better than ext2 because file system integrity is maintained, so the file system is at least consistent even after an unclean shutdown. In other words, you may loose data, but you won't have corrupt data.
/etc/fstab
Do not forget to read #Before you reboot before you make changes to /etc/fstab.
Edit /etc/fstab to change ext3 mount options:
# /dev/sda1 UUID=d4769677-d2a9-4d87-9165-fc44760495bc / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro,noatime,data=writeback 0 1
Older systems might use the /dev/hda1 notation (if upgrading you can get the UUID using the vol_id /dev/hda1 command):
/dev/hda1 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro,noatime,data=writeback 0 1
Before you reboot
Run this before you reboot after changing /etc/fstab.
tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /dev/sda1