New Harddisk noob question

[kajson]

Hello,

I have a bit of a noob question I guess, I just ordered a Samsung F3 1TB, as they seem to be decent and I'm waiting for next gen SSD before I go that way.

I always understood that the read speed on the outside of the platters is significantly faster then the inside. Which seems logical physicswise.

Now I want to partition my drive in 3 parts, one for system and most used software, one for storage and less used software, and one smaller downloading and temp files part.

Now for the question, I wonder how I can make sure(or if it goes automatic) that the C drive and Swap file go on the fastest part of the harddisk? Does this happen automatically or should I use a certain partition software for this?

 

[slyfox2151]

it partitions from the OUTSIDE to the INSIDE, so

Partition 1 - Outer edge
Partition 2 - Middle
Partition 3 - Inner disk.





Sorry it too so long for me to post

 

[qubit]

slyfox is correct, so put your operating system on the first partition.

Leave the swap/page file management on automatic. Any performance enhancements from fine tuning are marginal at best and can lead to errors in some cases.

I use Paragon Hard Disc Manager. Very reasonably priced and very powerful, so I can thoroughly recommend it.

 

[CJCerny]

This is a waste of time. You will not see any visible speed difference, that's for sure--other than the one that your wishful thinking wants you to see, of course. I suspect you won't be able to detect much of a difference with disk benchmarks either.

 

[kajson]

Ok good to know, I was thinking something like a 200-600-200 Gig spread.

I always put the swapfile on a fixed value twice the size of the physical memory, I shouldnt be doing this anymore? that would mean an 8 gig swap file.

 

[qubit]

Ok good to know, I was thinking something like a 200-600-200 Gig spread.

I always put the swapfile on a fixed value twice the size of the physical memory, I shouldnt be doing this anymore? that would mean an 8 gig swap file.

Your OS will certainly boot and feel faster on the outermost partition - I know, because I've tried it. How much of a difference though, depends on a lot of factors. It's certainly not a critical decision.

You can tweak the pagefile in many different ways, but again, it doesn't make a huge difference. Heck, it doesn't hurt to try! Google for pagefile optimization techniques and try them out. You might then want to post a thread about it on here, which would make for an interesting conversation.

 

[slyfox2151]

This is a waste of time. You will not see any visible speed difference, that's for sure--other than the one that your wishful thinking wants you to see, of course. I suspect you won't be able to detect much of a difference with disk benchmarks either.

This is compleatly incorrect. for one, it helps deal with fragmentation.
for 2, it keeps all the windows file on the outer edge and together, AKA less seeking more reading.


now rethink your post if you wish, im going to get some food.

 

[kajson]

Another question, I read that the access times are higher then advertised because a silent seek setting is automatically favoring silence over access time.
I wonder where do I find and alter these Harddisk settings? Or do I download a piece of Samsung software for it?

 

[NdMk2o1o]

Another question, I read that the access times are higher then advertised because a silent seek setting is automatically favoring silence over access time.
I wonder where do I find and alter these Harddisk settings? Or do I download a piece of Samsung software for it?

I think AAM (automatic acoustic management) is what you mean, you can download a program from Samsung to change this aswell as other options, some 3rd party programs will also allow you to do the same thing.

 

[LifeOnMars]

Another question, I read that the access times are higher then advertised because a silent seek setting is automatically favoring silence over access time.
I wonder where do I find and alter these Harddisk settings? Or do I download a piece of Samsung software for it?

HD tune Pro has an AAM tab which allows you to change this setting. Also very good for benching your drive and making sure you are getting the correct read, write etc..

 

[RejZoR]

HDD's are in general writting from outer edge inside to keep up the performance. Some drives like WD Caviar Black 2TB can be short stroked, you lose a bit of a disk space but access time goes down significantly as well as transfer rate. But i see no need really as these drives are fast enough for HDD's. If you want something drastically better you need either Momentus XT or pure SSD drive.

 

[twilyth]

Maybe you've already considered this, but wouldn't getting some very fast flash memory to use with ReadyBoost help a lot more than worrying about which partition to use?

 

[qubit]

@RejZoR

"Shortstroking" is a complete waste of time. It does nothing at all for performance and loses you lots of capacity.

If you can find anything on this to prove otherwise, I'd be interested to see it.

 

[NdMk2o1o]

If you can find anything on this to prove otherwise, I'd be interested to see it.

Seriousley it's not hard to LOOK.

Yes it is a waste because of the capacity you sacrifice, but saying it does nothing is just plain stupid or ignorant

Benches prove it does work:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157-10.html

At this time, one of the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B drives at 250 GB capacity should be available for $45, maybe even less. Getting four of them, limiting the capacity to a reasonable minimum and creating a RAID 0 or RAID 5 array will at least triple the throughput of a single drive, while also multiplying I/O performance.

 

[qubit]

Seriousley it's not hard to LOOK.

Yes it is a waste because of the capacity you sacrifice, but saying it does nothing is just plain stupid or ignorant

Benches prove it does work:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157-10.html

That's a bullshit article. Just use the first (outermost) partition and simply don't fill up the drive as much and you've effectively "short stroked" it. The idea being to keep all the data as physically close together as possible.

In the end, it makes no difference, because the OS is gonna take up the same number of gigabytes anyway - it's not like it compresses it to the outside of the platter. You shouldn't be keeping your data on C, either.

A defrag once in a while and you're good to go.

Shortstroking has been debunked here on TPU ages ago.

 

[slyfox2151]

Seriousley it's not hard to LOOK.

Yes it is a waste because of the capacity you sacrifice, but saying it does nothing is just plain stupid or ignorant

do you really need to sacrifice the space? the answer to this is no. to short stroke a drive, all your really doing is forcing the head to the outer most part of the drive 100% of the time.

this does not need to be the case, you could in fact create a 100GB partition on a 2TB drive for windows and random stuff, there now you have the fastest possible speed for that Partition for software that will be accessed MOST OFTEN.

now consider this, create a Second partition using the last 1.9TB of the drive, you can then store anything on it that A: does not get accessed often or B: does not require speed to be used.

a very good example of such Data is Movies, Iso's and Backups.

99% of the time you wont access that 1.9TB of data and thus the head will be on the outer 100GB partition 99% of the time, thus giving you all the benefits of a short stroked drive, yet not sacrificing any space.








EDIT:

the most important benefit to multiple partitions is fragmentation. having a few partitions will help keep data close together and make it quicker to defragment / rearange files for best performance.

 

[NdMk2o1o]

That's a bullshit article. Just use the first (outermost) partition and simply don't fill up the drive as much and you've effectively "short stroked" it. The idea being to keep all the data as physically close together as possible.

In the end, it makes no difference, because the OS is gonna take up the same number of gigabytes anyway. You shouldn't be keeping your data on C, either.

A defrag once in a while and you're good to go.

Shortstroking has been debunked here on TPU ages ago.

BS or not you asked someone to find something that says shortstroking isn't a waste of time, then you call BS on it, do you have proof it is BS or do we just accept that because you said it it must be true?

Where has it been debunked, please go and now prove that what you are speaking isn't BS. I want links and facts.

And it is not the same as partitioning, if you think that then you obviously don't understand the principles behind it.

Go and actually read the article before you call the authors work BS, it makes a lot of sense, but the question is not does it work but is it worth it and for most people no. Though it wasn't aimed at the general public, more towards an server environment.

Can you Raid seperate partitions from different drives?

 

[slyfox2151]

Can you Raid seperate partitions from different drives?

Yes, you can with an intel raid chipset, both ICH9R and ICH10R.

technicaly your not raiding the partitions, but yes you can have 2 Raid0 Arrays over the same set of disks.... or a Raid0 and a separate Raid 10 over the same disks.





also, AFAIK you can create as many partitions as you like on a Raid Array. the Raid system is completely invisible to the File system / OS.






(sorry to only pick out one point in your post.)
Currently reading this artical.






Wile where on the subject of short stroking. How is using that tool to force the hard drive into only using the first 44GB of the drive ANY DIFFERENT to partitioning the drive to use only 44GB. AFAIK both methods do the same thing. they are both at a software level.


in a raid0 or 5 environment for example, there is no difference to the Raid controller that they are 5GB disks or 50TB disks... this will have zero effect on the performance if you partition the Array @ 5GB per disk....


so a 6 Disk Raid0 array would be 30GB total space... or 5GB of the outer edge of each disk.... even if the total space available is over 12TB... the heads will never move past the 30GB partition.