Short stroke a single drive? (6400AAKS)

I have a 6400AAKS that is nearly full. After talking in the WHS sticky, I've decided that I'm just going to keep all of my data stored on my WHS (which currently has 1.20 TB of free space). Therefore, all that will be on my desktop HDD will mainly just be the OS, and I plan to have everything point to my WHS. Therefore, I don't plan on much being put on the 6400AAKS. I've seen a few people in a few threads talking about short stroking their raid0 6400aaks' to a 300GB partition.

Would I benefit from only a 150gb partition? Is there more involved that just using the Windows install disc to partition before installing windows?

I'd like to get the best performance I can out of the drive. Especially since I don't plan on keeping all of that data on the desktop anymore.

Yea that would work.

When you do the installer just make an x size partition and leave the rest unformatted.
I use 30gb OS partitions myself.

Having a large hard drive with just the OS installed on it is exactly the same as setting up a separate short stroked partition, other than the fact that it will not benchmark as quick. If all you have is the OS on the drive, the head will never leave that area on the drive, and your access time will be faster.

If you have to have the fastest benchmark times, then by all means, set up a small OS partition. Otherwise it is not needed.

Don

I short stroked my HD and it's fast.

I have 2x500 GB WD RE3 drives in a RAID 0.

The primary boot is a 160 GB partition



And the data drive is a 771 GB partition.



I'm shocked. Next time i redo my HD config, my documents/music is going on a smaller partition.

Obviously the burst rates are fucked up, they always seem to do that with hard drive testing these days at some point or another. Even taken directly from the buffer on a drive, if it's an SATA II the data will not transfer from drive to PC any faster than 300MB/s absolute theoretical max speed. So the inflated burst speeds are from the internal OS caching of data itself - not from the drive nor the drive's cache. It just can't go that fast...

Here's my two 80GB Velociraptors in RAID 0 with Windows 7 x64 7048 currently:





Now contrast that with the same drives about 1 minute later with the Write-back cache enabled on the Intel Storage Matrix controller:





Kinda screwy when that cache kicks in, eh?