With the Velociraptor hard drive we tested, performance began to drop noticeably at about the 200GB mark, as the HD Tune graph above indicates. You can partition and use the remainder of the drive, too, but you should store only infrequently accessed data there. Accomplishing this goal involves creating a primary partition of the correct size on the drive and then installing your OS and apps there. Given a constant spindle speed (10,000 rpm, in the Velociraptor’s case), the drive’s read/write heads can simply cover a larger area in a shorter amount of time when positioned over the outer edges of the platter, resulting in better performance.įor optimal system performance, you need to place your OS and all of your most commonly used applications and files in the fastest areas on the drive. This phenomenon occurs because hard drives are fastest when they access data from the outermost tracks on its platters. Similarly, access times were fastest in the early part of the test and grew slower as the test progressed. For this article, we tested a 1TB Western Digital Velociraptor drive and initially saw transfer rates in the vicinity of 210 megabytes per second, which gradually slowed to about 116 MBps. You’ll notice that performance starts at a relatively high level and then gradually tapers off. Connect the drive you want to test to this system as a secondary volume, and then run the benchmark tool.
To measure a hard drive’s performance, you’ll need access to a system that already has a fully functional OS installation on another drive. With that information in hand, you can tune your partition to balance overall performance against volume size.Īccess times nearly double and transfer speeds are halved along the inner edge of a 1TB WD Velociraptor drive, as compared with the outer edge other drives show a similar performance pattern.Īll you need is a benchmark tool like HD Tune or HD Tach that evaluates performance across an entire drive and graphs the results.
But no one likes to be limited by a tiny volume size, so it’s very useful to be able to determine where transfer rates begin to drop off on a hard drive. Generally, the smaller you make the initial, primary partition on a hard drive, the better that volume will perform. Knowing where the fastest sections of the drive are and partitioning the drive to take advantage of them are the keys to optimizing it. Hard drives perform differently depending on where data is stored on their platters. If upgrading to a solid-state drive isn’t the cards for you right no, you can improve the performance of your hard drive through a technique colloquially known as “short stroking.” In simple terms, short stroking a drive means partitioning it so as to use its highest-performing sectors. Even when paired with the fastest processors and lots of memory, a slow hard drive will drag down the a system’s overall performance and responsiveness, which is why upgrading to an SSD usually yields such significant performance gains. Unfortunately, mechanical hard drives also constitute one of the most significant performance bottlenecks in modern computer systems. Not sure if its even appropriate -will remove if so. But I see everyone on this platform as real astute IT professionals. Does anyone have any tips for me- a recent accounting/compsci grad with little-to-no I.Western Digital WD VelociRaptor internal hard drive.Solid-state drives are all the rage lately, thanks to their high transfer speeds and ultrafast access times, but most people still use cheap, spacious mechanical hard drives. Hello, A slightly weird question to be asking.
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