Gain of performance for harddisk by using 32bits transfers

adding the line

hdparm -c3 /dev/hdX
 
to a bootup script. For SuSE and probably other SYS V based systems
/sbin/init.d/boot.local works fine.
This enable 32 bit X-fer for you harddisk. On some systems it boost xfer
performance by 75%.
To test how much you gained type:

hdparm -t -T /dev/hdX