Improving hard drive performance - tips for gamers

Disabling hard drive caching is another technique that can benefit gamers who have more than 8GBs of memory
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Presumably the author meant the page file, not caching. Disabling write-caching on the hdd will decrease performance dramatically. On a side not disabling the page file is stupid even if you've got 16gb+ memory. Superfetch is clever enough to use memory first if available....don't try to second guess it. Hell the OS is designed from the ground up with the assumption that there is a pagefile.

The short-stoking thing is equally idiotic. Rather create 2 partitions on the drive: One for games (create it 1st) and a second for long term storage of stuff. Same speed gain but you don't lose out on half your disk space. :rolleyes:

Gabonica said:
Despite what MS would have you believe, fragmentation is very much alive and well on an NTFS system
http://www.piriform.com/defraggler
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The built-in defrag program is an adapted form of diskeeper (MS licensed it from them), so chances of a 3rd party app doing a better job a near zero. Plus Vista/Win7 defrag whenever idle so effectively there is rarely an real build-up of fragmentation.
 
Short stoking = short stRoking. Also the outside of a disc spins faster than the inside, otherwise it would shatter :p
 
rorz0r said:
Short stoking = short stRoking. Also the outside of a disc spins faster than the inside, otherwise it would shatter :p
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This is true. The writer of the article has it swapped around.
 
Article updated to clarify Short Stroking. :)

I was thinking of two ideas and mixed them up in the one paragraph. Outer sectors of the drive will lead to faster throughput as more data can be read per cycle, whereas a partition using only the inner sectors of the drive should result in faster access times.

HavocXphere - True one could assign the free space as a second partition and use it for seldom used files(media storage for example). One could even short stroke two separate hard drive, then software raid the two partitions. There is more to short stroking than the contents of that article.

MightyMuffinMan - I don't recall ever mentioning spinning faster? I said the distance per revolution in shorter on the inner sections of disks, pretty much what you just said. :)
 
HavocXphere said:
The built-in defrag program is an adapted form of diskeeper (MS licensed it from them), so chances of a 3rd party app doing a better job a near zero. Plus Vista/Win7 defrag whenever idle so effectively there is rarely an real build-up of fragmentation.
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Defraggler gives you a better visual and allows you to move large files to the end of the drive. It just looks nicer :)
 
Yip, I think the most important ideas here are, keep your games on a separate drive, and if you have the money, get a good SSD.
 
For speed, get 2 smalish SDD's and RAID 0 them for the OS + Games drive. Will get blistering speeds.
Use seperate drive for storage or NAS.
 
snobee said:
Yip, I think the most important ideas here are, keep your games on a separate drive, and if you have the money, get a good SSD.
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agreed. I did that not knowing that it would actually help performance.
 
Derrick said:
Outer sectors of the drive will lead to faster throughput as more data can be read per cycle:)
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Nice...never thought of it that way.

spiderz said:
For speed, get 2 smalish SDD's and RAID 0 them for the OS + Games drive. Will get blistering speeds.
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I suspect that you'll run into other bottlenecks & thus not get much value per rand.
 
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