Accelerate Your Hard Drive By Short Stroking

[mcmd]

Originally Posted by Sir Skully

Wait, I don't get it.

[CrowdAds]

[polonyc2]

is is better to have a small partition on the same drive or use a separate hard drive altogether as a boot/OS drive?

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by polonyc2

is is better to have a small partition on the same drive or use a separate hard drive altogether as a boot/OS drive?

If you have multiple drives, I think it's best to use your fastest drive as the boot and put a small partition on it for the OS. All the other partitions/drives are just storage of one sort or another.

[Sir Skully]

I think it may be a different story with SSD'S, as access time is next to nothing. No need for a small os partition.

[ctal]

There are some people who will argue in favor of segregating the os partition and/or drive from program files as well as data files, but I've never been a believer in that. Assuming all of the drives are mechanical, my feeling is to take the drive that has the fastest access times, and create a small partition at its front to hold the os, program files, and data files other than files which are very large (e.g. video files), or that occupy a lot of space due to their number (e.g., large photo or audio collections). Use everything else to store those large files, images, backups, etc.

If you were to dedicate a full drive to the just the os, or to the os plus program files, the os and program files would quickly spread themselves across random locations throughout the drive, and you would lose the speed benefit of having the most frequently accessed files "up front," on the fastest part of the drive.

Regards,
-- Al

[pcmanabc]

that sounds a little incrediable ,and it works really?

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by pcmanabc

that sounds a little incrediable ,and it works really?

Yes, really.

[Anarchi]

Subconsciously, I've always done this anyway, i.e. stick Windows on a 20GB partition, with the rest of the HDD as Drive D: containing all the installed apps. All games go on another HDD in E:\games

[GWillakers]

Short stroking seems to be a waste of disk space.

Hard drive performance is one of the key issues with PC performance.
A PC with its file system laid down correctly can often out perform a PC of a later generation.

Some things to keep in mind:

1. If you can afford an SSD get one.
{To anyone with a lot of SSD/server experience: They advertise SSD's with 1 million hours MTBF. This equates to like 117 years. Is this realistic? I mean can one even expect SSD to have a a 5X lifespan over HD's (figuring a HD will last say 3 years?)}

2. Some HD's have a Jumper for either Quiet or performance operation.

3. How one initially formats the disk can make a HUGE difference in how ones system ulitimately performs.

I've tended to notice better performance with larger clusters than the defaults. Media files tend to be huge. If you want to defrag a volume, and these need to be moved you will be glad the heads are moving large chunks rather than making several small time consuming trips.

{caveats: Windows 2000 allows >4k clusters but its defragger can't handle them. Vista's Boot disk has to have 4K clusters}

4. Consider RAID 0 {striping} or Raid 5 for better performance.
But if this is a desktop system I advice against it. If it breaks even once the time you lose you will never recapture. Only set up a Raid system if you are curious, want a learning experience or need server I/O

5. Place your Paging file on the fastest least used physical volume you have.
Or better yet, use multiple physical volumes for the pagefile if you have them.
My understanding is that the paging can be carried out for each process independently.


6. I don't like Windows default placement of the paging file for single volume systems. Most of the time the paging file is placed in the center of the pack, and the operating system files get moved towards the beginning of the pack with defragmentation.

Head movement in this type of system reminds me of a Fat kid doing the shuttle run in Junior High. You don't want your Hardrive contiually seeking from the start of the drive to the center. If you have a 500GB drive, the OS and the Pagefile could be over 240 Gigs away! Lets have some mercy for the fat kid! Since you can't control where the pagefile will reside within a volume, I suggest that you create a small logical volume for it and place it directly in front of volume which will contain your windows system files.

[ctal]

Excellent, thought-provoking post, GWillakers.

Re SSD MTBF's, mechanical hard drives tend to have similarly absurd numbers. For instance, these enterprise-class Raptors are rated at 1.2 million hours: http://www.wdc.com/en/library/sata/2...df?wdc_lang=en

I believe the rationale behind those numbers goes something like this (my numbers are chosen just for purposes of illustration): They run 100 hdd's for one year, find that one has failed, and declare that the mtbf is 100 years. Of course, that ignores the fact that virtually all of them will fail a whole lot sooner than 100 years, due to degradation caused by age and use.

Mark Twain once said "there are lies, damn lies, and statistics."

Regards,
-- Al

[Sir Skully]

I run 3xSSD's in RAID-O, with page filing turned off.
I have 12gig of memory so I see no need for a page file.
Also with so much memory, I use 3gig of it for a ram drive.
On the ram drive, I have Opera and Safari browser.
The browsers are faster on the ram drive.