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. 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. 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.
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