Accelerate Your Hard Drive By Short Stroking

[Sir Skully]

Here's something to speed up your HD. Ya may want a have a look see.....
Accelerate Your Hard Drive By Short Stroking : On The Stroke Of Performance: Hard Drive Short Stroking - Review Tom's Hardware

[CrowdAds]

[ctal]

Sounds to me like the same thing could be accomplished by proper partitioning. Just create a smallish partition at the beginning of the drive, with space adequate to contain everything other than those data files that require large amounts of space (e.g., video files, or large collections of audio files or photographs). Put the latter on a separate partition occupying the rest of the drive (as well as on a separate backup drive).

That should give the same kind of results as described in the article, without the need for special software.

I routinely do that on all of my machines.

Regards,
-- Al

[Sir Skully]

Originally Posted by ctal

Sounds to me like the same thing could be accomplished by proper partitioning. Just create a smallish partition at the beginning of the drive, with space adequate to contain everything other than those data files that require large amounts of space (e.g., video files, or large collections of audio files or photographs). Put the latter on a separate partition occupying the rest of the drive (as well as on a separate backup drive).

That should give the same kind of results as described in the article, without the need for special software.

I routinely do that on all of my machines.

Regards,
-- Al

I forgot......
At one time I did the same thing as you describe in the above.
I can remember at the time, I thought it was faster/os.
Why I ever quit using a small os partition ..
My next install of an os, I"ll have to give it a go.....

[ctal]

No reason to wait, if you don't want to. Just image the drive (so that you don't have to reinstall everything if something goes wrong), then use a partition management program to reduce the size of your "c" partition, to whatever amount of space is actually used plus a reasonable margin (perhaps such that the total size of the reduced partition is twice the amount of used space).

Although with all of your super-whizzbang RAID arrays and such, there might be issues selecting imaging programs and partition management programs that can see the arrays, depending on how the arrays are implemented, driver requirements, etc.

Regards,
-- Al

[Sir Skully]

Originally Posted by ctal

No reason to wait, if you don't want to. Just image the drive (so that you don't have to reinstall everything if something goes wrong), then use a partition management program to reduce the size of your "c" partition, to whatever amount of space is actually used plus a reasonable margin (perhaps such that the total size of the reduced partition is twice the amount of used space).

Although with all of your super-whizzbang RAID arrays and such, there might be issues selecting imaging programs and partition management programs that can see the arrays, depending on how the arrays are implemented, driver requirements, etc.

Regards,
-- Al

Yeah I hear ya, but I've disconnected my Hard drives.
I was getting some hard drive noise when booting the SSD's.
For now I'm happy with the SSD's
Thanks for the info....

[polonyc2]

I never created a small partition at the beginning of a drive before...might give it a try when I do my next reformat...does it offer tangible performance improvements or only synthetic benchmark ones?...how much space do you partition in the front?...sounds fun

[ctal]

Originally Posted by polonyc2

I never created a small partition at the beginning of a drive before...might give it a try when I do my next reformat...does it offer tangible performance improvements or only synthetic benchmark ones?...how much space do you partition in the front?...sounds fun

I've never particularly done any with/without comparisons, because it just seems like a common sense thing to do, at least with the system partition where accesses to random locations are going on all the time.

As any hard-drive speed benchmark program will show, such as HDTune, both access times and sequential read and write speeds near the "end" of a mechanical hard drive are, as a rough ballpark, twice as slow as near the "beginning" of the drive. That's because the outer part of the platter (the "beginning") has a much faster tangential velocity past the heads than the inner part. So it stands to reason that you want to keep frequently accessed files, such as Windows files, near the beginning.

A good defragmenter program will help accomplish that a little bit, but with typical hard drives these days being vastly larger than what is needed in the "c" partition, having a small "c" partition at the beginning of the drive will be more effective and also make frequent defragmenting less necessary.

Re "how much space," twice the amount of currently used space is probably a reasonable rough ballpark, or possibly more depending on how much future growth you can envision occuring in the "c" partition. If there are large video files in the "c" partition, increase that factor somewhat, because those files will require significant extra room during defragmentation.

If you have an imaging program and a partition management program available, that you know you can count on, you don't have to worry about mis-judging the partition sizes because you can easily change them later.

Regards,
-- Al

[polonyc2]

since you can't specify the physical location of a partition I'm assuming the first partition you create on a drive will automatically take the fastest edge correct?

I know that HD Tach has an 'Advanced Size Check' benchmark which tests only the first 8 GB of your drive and access times are much improved when using this...guess I never thought about actually setting up a partition like this...guess it's the same principle as setting up a seprate hard drive for your OS/applications...good info

[ctal]

Originally Posted by polonyc2

since you can't specify the physical location of a partition I'm assuming the first partition you create on a drive will automatically take the fastest edge correct?

That's certainly true with XP, and I'd feel pretty confident the same is true with Vista and W7. Not sure about Linux, though.

The left-to-right graphical depiction of the hard drive that is shown in Windows Disk Management (at least in XP) shows the partitions in the order of their physical placement (the leftmost one being at the beginning/outer/fastest part of the drive).

Regards,
-- Al

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by ctal

Sounds to me like the same thing could be accomplished by proper partitioning. Just create a smallish partition at the beginning of the drive, with space adequate to contain everything other than those data files that require large amounts of space (e.g., video files, or large collections of audio files or photographs). Put the latter on a separate partition occupying the rest of the drive (as well as on a separate backup drive).

That should give the same kind of results as described in the article, without the need for special software.

I routinely do that on all of my machines.

Regards,
-- Al

I have always done the same. Just seemed to me to be a sensible way to organize things to support a system & data backup routine.

[k0NG0]

Perhaps I'm damaged by years of spam, but the headline to this thread reads like some sort of sex technique spam mail to me...

[CYCLOPS]

Always chose to isolate the OS in its own partition, to the extent of setting the temp folders and other garbage collecting folders to another partition. Likewise, isolate all programs to their own partition.

This was mostly for the purpose of backup and restore.
Much faster to run backups and incrementals (daily) of the OS partition. These will run very quickly (automated) and ensure the current state of the OS gets frequent and duplicate backups.
(Multiple backups to multiple locations).
As 99.9% of crashes are a Windows related and usually registry error, restore of the OS partition is quick and easy and a more viable option than either repair or having to restore a huge partition and with no danger of losing the installed programs.

The problem, no matter how carefully you isolate any Windows OS, it still grows over time as everything these days wants to add something in some Windows system folder.
10g soon became 15 and 15 soon became 20.
I recall having to resize the OS partition a few times for ever expanding growth but it is still a small number compared to current drives thee days where a 450g backup would take a whole day!

If you fail to create enough overhead freespace, Windows has a nasty habit of silently and without warning eating itself to make room!

Being a smaller partition, and the first written to, it ends up on the fastest outside portion of the platter. I have always believed that lead to increased performance even in older and less powerful machines. I also believe keeping the garbage out of the OS partition lets a lean and mean OS run much faster.

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by k0NG0

Perhaps I'm damaged by years of spam, but the headline to this thread reads like some sort of sex technique spam mail to me...

I thought so too, but decided not to comment on it. Thought maybe it was just my own warped sense of humor, but apparently that was not the case.

[k0NG0]

Originally Posted by PeterT

I thought so too, but decided not to comment on it. Thought maybe it was just my own warped sense of humor, but apparently that was not the case.

We're clearly very disturbed.

[Sir Skully]

Originally Posted by k0NG0

We're clearly very disturbed.