Need Faster Harddrive?

D

dark_legacy2006

New Member
Ok i have 160gig, 7200rpm harddrive (8mb cache i believe) i ahve this music folder with loads and loads of music and a few movies in there 2. And it laods slow so i took out all the movies deleted all the things i could, and it works considerable faster. Im n ot sure if a 10000rom hd would work better or whats the solution.
 
Adding to sniperhchang's comment, files get more fragmented the fuller the drive is (especially new files) and it becomes more difficult to defragment because there is not a lot of space to use for that. High fragmentation will slow things down.

Starman*
 
you need 15% disk space free to defrag efficiently.
or so windows tells my dad all the time. i keep telling him to upgrade because disk space is dirt cheap nowadays... hes got a 20gb and a 60gb and both are ide... his mobo supports sata! lol
 
yeah, you do need 15% free space, lol, if my mobos supported SATA, i'd have SATA drives lol, i dont know if they even support SATA lol.
 
The problem with 10,000 RPM drives, is that, in the SATA configuration, AFAIK, they only go to 150 GB (WD Raptor). So in this case, you'll see the "Slow down before full" effect. WD raptors also have a HIGH rate of failure. Maybe you should get a separate drive to house your data files, so they're not clogging your main drive slowing system performance. Perhaps a new SATA for the system, and IDE for file storage.
 
problem is i already tired disc defragrment and i got 120 gigs left out of 186, and instead of getting a different drive if i partioned it for different things would that help?
 
dark_legacy2006 said:
problem is i already tired disc defragrment and i got 120 gigs left out of 186, and instead of getting a different drive if i partioned it for different things would that help?
Click to expand...
Sounds to me like there's something else going on with your system. Performance shouldn't be that bad durring normal operation with those kinds of statistics. How much RAM does this machine have? If it's 512, concider an upgrade to 1GB. You'll be surprised at how much a gig of ram improves system performance. Partitioning really doesn't help, as all the access is still being done on the same physical disk, but again, I'd run some infection scans, because if performance is really this poor, and all of a sudden, something sounds like it's infected, and that infection is having massive disk usage.
 
dark_legacy2006 said:
Ok i have 160gig, 7200rpm harddrive (8mb cache i believe) i ahve this music folder with loads and loads of music and a few movies in there 2. And it laods slow so i took out all the movies deleted all the things i could, and it works considerable faster. Im n ot sure if a 10000rom hd would work better or whats the solution.
Click to expand...

the problem is that you probably had so many damn files in there that when u go to access it, the harddrive seriously like, stops, sees all the crap, and has to give itself CPR before it tells you whats inside. My harddrives are all 7200's, and work great. But i too had a music folder with folders and folders of music, and spare songs. 17600 songs split into 3 folders. it would take my HDD about 4 or 5 seconds to actually load the window when i clicked on those folders. Happens the same way with my porn collection.... just split up the files, put em in folders, seperate it so that the HDD doesnt have so much to have to read all at once.
 
Although partitioning does not speed things up in itself, smart planning can improve things considerably.

1. Every file has a minimum size. Even with nothing in it, the system allocates a certain amount of space. The smaller the partition, the smaller that space is. If you have a lot of tiny files, you will get more on your hdd with smaller partitions.

2. People think that big files are a problem. A drive with 200 movies is easier to read than one with 200,000 images. My video partition takes about 5 secs for PerfectDisk to read. My working images partition, minutes.

3. File numbers make a difference, fragmentation a big difference. My two hdds have about 400,000 files each and they are not particularly slow. I can have up to 120,000 file ops a day which means defragging some partitions every week. If I don't the pc slows down. A few more files don't make the slightest difference.

4. By sensible partitioning you can minimize defragging. Put all your base files like movies and images in their own partition/s. If you just play them, the partition will almost never need defragging because playing is just accessing the files not modifying them. The files stay in exactly the same place on the hdd.

Use another partition/s for working on/editing files/temp files. It will see a lot of file ops and need regular defragging. However, you only have to defrag this partition not your zillion Gb of movies.

There are lots of ways to partition to suit your style. My partitions are:

System and Prog Files
Working Area
Video

Daily Backups and Temp Files
Long-term Backups
Paging

Starman*
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top