HDD making it use the fastest part of the disc

[Stildawn]

Hi All

Just got myself a 120gb SSD... However I have boundless amounts of music/videos/photos etc that just wont make their way onto the SSD...

I have a 1tb drive... I have heard somewhere that certain parts of HDD work fast due to the position the data is on the plater (the disc inside lol)

Is there anyway to make a partition, or tell windows to write files to that part?

Since I want the music and stuff that I use the most to be the most fast lol.

 

[kobaj]

What you're wanting is called short stroking.

From what I've read, you can only do it to new partitions, and it is very limited. Though, using short stroking for music, videos, and photos is pointless. These are data types that don't require extreme speeds by any means.

 

[Nanobyte]

You will probably get better performance by defragmenting. I recollect one defragger that puts the most used files in the centre of the partition. Presumably the heads tends to hang around that area.

I use PerfectDisk which puts the most recent and recently-used files toward the inside, less used toward the outside and boot files on the outside edge (easy to find and not used after boot). That's fine but I don't see it as being a vital strategy.

Using specific parts of the HDD is not going to speed things up very much. Watch a 90 minute movie and you saved perhaps 100 millisecs starting to load it?

 

[kobaj]

You will probably get better performance by defragmenting. I recollect one defragger that puts the most used files in the centre of the partition. Presumably the heads tends to hang around that area.

I use PerfectDisk which puts the most recent and recently-used files toward the inside, less used toward the outside and boot files on the outside edge (easy to find and not used after boot). That's fine but I don't see it as being a vital strategy.

Using specific parts of the HDD is not going to speed things up very much. Watch a 90 minute movie and you saved perhaps 100 millisecs starting to load it?

You've gotten it backwards. The outer edge of the platter is the "fast" portion of the drive (because the arm doesn't have to do much track switching). But a defragger that does that would be pretty slick.

 

[Nanobyte]

You've gotten it backwards. The outer edge of the platter is the "fast" portion of the drive

I did not mention speed anywhere. Raxco's descriptions are quite confusing, referring to "front", "back", "inside" and "outside" with no cross-reference to physical location.

Perfectdisk strategy is quite complicated. Reading a file is not just the speed of reading the data. From what I can deduce, the philosophy is that reducing fragmentation, logical placement of different file types, the MFT and the free space reduces IO operations, speeding the disk up.