Increase your mechanical drive (HDD) performance .

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  1. Posts : 1,318
    Windows 10
       #1

    Increase your mechanical drive (HDD) performance - Hell Corner


    Here are some hints for the proud owners of HDDs & SSHDs to increase their hard drive performance since even the best of systems might have a secondary one of those , which might act as a system bottle neck to a point :

    1 - It is better to have your manufacturer driver for SATA controller (Often referred to as Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver or RST Raid by manufacturers) in "Device Manager > IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" no matter how old it is . If windows persist to update it to a different version you may well have to tick "System Properties > Hardware > Device Installation Settings" to [No] to stop Microsoft from installing its own crippled drivers .

    2 - Often check "Disk Usage" (sometimes Disk) in "Task Manager" in PC idle times , it should be at 0% for elongated time spans . Fluctuating disk usage when PC is idle is usually caused by either poorly designed Antiviruses , crazy Superfetch indexing service or use of system Swap . If present you should fix it by swapping Antivirus by a more calm one (Or nagging your current one's support for a fix) , disable Superfetch service (found in services.msc) and finally note that 8 GB Ram + is the norm nowadays , any less and the Swap file abuse may surface . (If you are wondering as of why you should do this , it is simply because the reading header of the mechanical disk will be stressed trying to either process or copy files you are currently using and yet do the other Antivirus or OS disk activities at the same time which would slow it down significantly) .

    3 - Schedule your system to defrag over night , clustered data leave the reading headers stressed trying to collect data from different clusters than if it was in sequential order .

    4 - Sometimes windows do a suspicious habit of downloading updates in background without that showing in system until they are ready to install , this might cause the system to show some lag while processing something or playing games . If you are not very fond of that habit you may well set your internet connection to a "Metered" which would inhibit that & increase your disk performance . Yet remember to do manual checks for updates from time to time .

    5 - Another suspicious behavior you might find yourself enrolled in without your consent is "Microsoft Customer Experience Program" basically the claim is that this program only triggers when PC is idle to collect and send who knows what data to Microsoft to process and customize your experience (Really?) . However you might find this program triggering at the peek of your usage and hinder your CPU performance by 25~50% and disk usage by around 50% often showing in Task Manager under alias "Microsoft Compatibility Telemetry" . If you get to notice it doing that just run Task Scheduler (taskschd.msc) : Microsoft > Windows > Application Experience - and rather disable both : "Microsoft Compatibility Appraiser" & "ProgramDataUpdater" tasks then reboot .

    6 - System restore was initially designed to trigger on schedule but since systems might be off at scheduled times it often runs out of random during user activity , I can not recommend shutting it off despite I often do , but as a hint , when this beast is on , expect everything to slow down not just hard drives .
    Last edited by nIGHTmAYOR; 02 Oct 2018 at 06:25.
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  2. Posts : 8,037
    Windows 11 Pro 64 bit
       #2

    You can use this excellent site to identify the best IRST driver for your PC https://www.win-raid.com/t2f23-Intel...QL-v-WHQL.html
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  3. Posts : 11,246
    Windows / Linux : Arch Linux
       #3

    Hi there

    The only sensible way of improving HDD's (apart from replacing with SSD's) is:

    To ensure that you get 7200 RPM HDD's - not 5400 RPM one's, ensure they have a large cache (as large as possible) and that they are SATA / e-SATA and not IDE. AHCI drivers are standard and work fine these days - it's most unlikely apart from some special server models like HP that you will need special drivers for the HDD's.

    Anything else is just pure snake oil.

    Cheers
    jimbo
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  4. Posts : 5,492
    Windows 11 Home
       #4

    Lets not forget about short-stroking, it can increase perfomance by ~30%.

    Short Stroke a Hard Drive - Make your spinning disk faster - YouTube

    I will avoid buying SSD as long as I can. SSD does not improve performance, just loading times.
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails Increase your mechanical drive (HDD) performance .-capture_10022018_120150.jpg  
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  5. Posts : 11,246
    Windows / Linux : Arch Linux
       #5

    TairikuOkami said:
    Lets not forget about short-stroking, it can increase perfomance by ~30%.

    Short Stroke a Hard Drive - Make your spinning disk faster - YouTube

    I will avoid buying SSD as long as I can. SSD does not improve performance, just loading times.
    Hi there

    I don't usually tell people they are totally crazy - but you really are off your head with this one - so I have to say to you that your remark here is total Bovine Scatology !!!

    I don't know anybody who says replacing an HDD with an SSD for the OS hasn't improved performance -- significantly.

    Unless you are running an old machine running the old windows/286 (yes windows did have a windows/286 version) with those 8 inch large 512KB floppy disks and a "massive 4KB" yes KB memory - not a typo !! then an SSD will certainly improve performance on almost any machine - even old ones. (Always assuming enough RAM in the first place - even the CPU itself is not a huge factor in this for typical tasks.

    Just think of the physics involved -- to access a piece of data on an HDD - computer (or controller) has to do the following (base processes - ignore paging /swapping)

    1) read index to find out physical address of HDD where the data lies.
    2) run code to move access mechanism to that particular physical address
    3) read data -- transfer time on HDD's is slow as well.
    4) indicate to OS -- done - now can continue.

    while computer is servicing the I/O that task is stopped / wait state

    SSD - the whole disk is mapped like an array so almost zero time to access the address (no moving parts)
    data transfer is orders of magnitude faster from a solid state device than a physical device which still relies on magnetic cores and electric circuits where the principle was worked out in the days of Faraday (late C19 !!).

    Whether photoshop editing, spreadsheet calculations or almost anything I really can't see how an SSD doesn't improve things "Mega-ly"

    Cheers
    jimbo
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  6. Posts : 5,492
    Windows 11 Home
       #6

    jimbo45 said:
    I don't know anybody who says replacing an HDD with an SSD for the OS hasn't improved performance -- significantly.
    I have not seen a single test, which would prove otherwise.
    FPS in games is the same regardless, if it is HDD or SSD.
    Apps load into RAM, so the disk speed does not matter.
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  7. Posts : 11,246
    Windows / Linux : Arch Linux
       #7

    Hi there

    you didn't say Gaming -- of course it doesn't matter for essentially "Non I/O bound processes"

    But for most typical users of Windows where running games isn't a major part of the work tasks are much more I/O bound and then it DOES matter.

    I think before making statements like an SSD doesn't improve performance you have to state how the machine is being used. Without any details one assumes an average Windows user task set.

    Obviously if tiny I/O after game has loaded then improving I/O won't help the game -- I think a lot of intensive games now have specialized GPU's to deal with them anyway.

    Cheers
    jimbo
      My Computer


  8. Posts : 5,492
    Windows 11 Home
       #8

    It is not just games, Windows and software included. Of course there is software, which would benefit it, like video editing, but virtually no one uses that. The point is, that it is not worth paying 5 times more, just so an app would load in 2 secs instead of 10 secs. But advertising works and almost everyone goes for SSD.

    It is about the definition of performance, for me it is, how well does something run, not how fast it starts.
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  9. Posts : 1,696
    X
       #9

    I don't know about your situation, Tairiku. But over here the SSDs offer a MASSIVE boost in performance.

    My database runs faster.
    My piano software used to load in minutes, but now it's just seconds.
    My financial spreadsheets load and save in seconds.

    Everything gets better with an SSD.
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  10. Posts : 5,492
    Windows 11 Home
       #10

    Thanks for confirming it, as I was saying loading/saving times improved.
    I prefer RAMDisk for critical operations, it is 5-20 times faster than SSD.
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