large hard drive efficiency 3

[iceman2654]

Hello,

Well i'm sure everyone is aware that these days the standard hard drive size is HUGE. I've noticed that every few months of use my computer becomes real slow as a result of my hard drive, even after defragging.

I was wondering what is the most efficient hard drive system. ie have two hard drives, one relativley small for the OS and one big one for applications and data. Or a nice big one and partition it. OR is does having a huge hard drive make a difference for efficiency...

Thanks in advance,

Jonathan Leong

 

[cbmudd]

Why are you blaming the hard drive????

Have you checked you msconfig startup list. If it is big uncheck everything that you dont need. Also run adawre. I useally install windows on a 15 to 20 gig partician and then use the disk manager in administrative tools to format the rest of the hard drive.

 

[iceman2654]

so size does matter for windows?

 

[ski]

If the system runs fast with a new HD and slows down after a few months, then the HD may not be the cause.
In addition to cbmudd's excellent suggestions to shut down unnecessary programs running in the background, and running Ad-aware, also run Spybot, CWShredder, and Hijack This(no one spyware program finds everything), update your AV program with the latest files and do a virus search, run ScanDisk, and clean out your browser's cache.

On the other hand, if one installs new applications after the HD gets filled up with a lot of video, music, and picture files, then these new applications will load slower than applications that were installed when the HD contained little more than the O/S.

 

[iceman2654]

thanks cbmudd and ski i'll def continue doing those things to keep my hard drive "clean"

And cbmudd i'm not blaming the hard drive, i'm just wondering if there's a difference, because i'm building a new system and I started thinking about hard drive efficiency.

Thanks again everyone. :]

 

[edfair]

You can also clean out the temporary files, then delete and recreate the directory. And clean out the temporary internet files and cookies.
Files and directories grow. Then as you search them the search has to proceed all the way through them. And with dynamic expansion they get fragged. Defragging helps, but isn't the only answer.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[cbmudd]

Iceman, I did not mean to sound like you had your Blame thrower out. Also I have read that some hard drives use
Acoustic Management settings . They can be disabled with the proper utilities. I guess this might help if you are trying to play video on a single ata hard drive.

Useally the hard drive is the bottle neck of speed.
If you are building a new system check out serial ata motherboards or think about stripeing two ata 133 hard drives on a raid controller. You can get two 60 or 80 gig HD's pretty cheap these days. I run windows xp pro on a 20 gig partician on the primary IDE, and keep all my video on a stiped set on a raid controller.

 

[dakota81]

Performance aside, it's not really a good idea to have one large partition anyways. If you ever need to reload windows, it's best having your primary partition relatively small so that you can easily format it knowing all your important data is on the second partition.

 

[BernardStewart]

A useful thing to do is to create a partition of 4Gb and allocate this for the windows pagefile. This way the pagefile never gets fragmented as you add other progs and data.
It helps improve the virtual memory handling.

 

[BadBigBen]

Usually, slow down of HD performance in Windows, is caused by prefetching and indexing services... by turning these off or periodically cleaning the associated folders out, can improve performance of the HD... most users will never notice the difference of a few Milliseconds anyhow...



Ben

If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer...

 

[ceh4702]

Some resource hogs like Zone Alarm and Norton can really cause problems. That along with things like AIM and weatherbug that want to startup when Windows does can really slow the system down also. Anything running in the background can slow your system down. Also make sure that if you have a network your networking is not configured as Master Browser.

There are other windowsXP items that can be turned off.

This website may give you some clues:

http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/winxp.htm

If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[cdogg]

I've noticed that every few months of use my computer becomes real slow as a result of my hard drive, even after defragging

That tells you that it's not the way the hard drive was setup. Instead, the reason is likely one of the causes that others have posted above.

As for "efficiency", there are many options. A common option is to create a smaller partition for the OS (<20GB), and at least one other for applications and data. I usually have at least 3 using the third for data that changes frequently (a "cache" partition for burning, downloading, etc). This makes backing up, restoring, and defragging a smoother process.

Performance relies very little on how you setup the partitions, and more on other advanced features like a RAID configuration or placing the pagefile on a separate hard drive. Both options have a greater effect.


~cdogg
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