I'd like to know how Linux handles file caching.
There obviously has to be some caching going on.
How do I access and maybe change some settings though?

My situation...

I've created my own little Linux boot disk with a few utilities on.
Typically I use the boot disk to backup, copy and maintain my PC's.
I've noticed that the copying of files using the boot disk takes significantly longer than when I do it on my Linux PC.
I'm working on FAT partitions.

Am I missing some executables on my boot disk?
Is there some sort of "SmartDrv" for Linux, or does everything get handled by the kernel?
In which case, how do I set it up?

If someone can help with this i'd really appreciate it.

Your harddisk is probably not set in optimal mode. You can change that using hdparm. But I'd be carefull with the command because you can mess up your data if you do things wrong. Do a search on this site or in your favourite search engine for tweaking drives with hdparm.

Thanks.

It's exactly what I was looking for.

I got my speed up from around 4Mb/second to above 15Mb/second.

15mb/s isn't too hot still, a standard ata100 drive on a decent system should get about double that. my generic 5400rpm drives does about 30mbps, and it's nothing hot at all, maybe read up on hdparm a bit more to find those extra tweaks.

[root@trevor tmp]# hdparm -X66 -d1 /dev/hda
[root@trevor tmp]# hdparm -t /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 2.26 seconds = 28.32 MB/sec

Mmmmmmm....

The system I ran it on is a P3 450, ATA66 HDD.
The cached read speed was 74Mb/second.

I did notice there were some tweaks that were HDD specific and dangerous if you get it wrong.

I'm going to be running the same tweaks on many different systems, so I can't be too greedy, I might crash some HDD's.

I'm doing the following...

hdparm -c3d1m8 /dev/hda

The only one a bit risky there is the "m8", but I think it'll be ok.

You got any advice to make it better but keep it safe?