How to maximize write speed on a HDD?

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Astralogic

Gawd
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Apr 24, 2012
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Hi, I want to maximize my write speeds on a standard HDD (for recording gameplay video).

I have distrix ultimate defrag and I'm wondering what settings would give me the best write speeds for new files. I did email distrix a few days back but they haven't replied yet.

Any help appreciated.
Thanks
 
Repartition the drive so that your recording space is always near the beginning of the drive, with some safety margin after for growth.
 
How would I make a partition on the fastest part of the drive? I know how to make partitions, just not on specific parts of the drive.
 
Well, one way would be to run hdtune or hdtach and determine how 'far' into the drive does the speed begin to plummet.
Then, simplest way is to determine what percentage of total megabytes is 'good enough' for your needs.
It doesn't have to be super accurate :)
Personally, I go a step forward and apply the HPA command, making the last,say, 66% completely invisible.

edit essentially you'd have to shift your existing partitions to the right. Gparted is a nice tool.
Risky if that's your OS drive.
 
If I haven't made myself clear - whenever you see a drive represented as a horizontal strip, then, the left-most part is the fastest - both for stream speed and random access. You probably need sheer speed.

If the drive in question is your OS drive, then backup first! Like with Clonezilla.

Also, the process of shifting all existing data towards the 'right' side will take a lot of time. Hours.

Another trick is creating a, say, 10 Gig partition first and place your page file (swap file) there. You can also format both of these 'maximum' performance partitions as FAT32 instead of NTFS.
 
don't waste your time messing around re-partitioning.. the gains are minimal and the effort to move your data around and then back is to much work on a spining disk. If you are serious, buy a 2nd drive that is an ssd. Send all your recordings to the SSD. its the only solution you will not have to constantly tinker with other then deleting crappy recordings to free up space. Move good recordings to an archive drive. Do any video editing with the ssd as your temp drive.
 
If it's your OS drive don't bother. If it's secondary HDD then partition the beginning like mentioned. Otherwise secondary SSD is best like also mentioned.

Also you don't want defrag progs running in the background that may slow it down. Some of them are good and only operate when the drive is idle which would be ok. But for recording to a dedicated empty partition you don't need defrag.

If you have a bunch of spare memory you could write to a RAMDISK.
 
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Its not my OS drive, I just want to maximize the hd write speed, its pretty much fine as it is I just want to get the most I can to limit the odd stutter every now and then.

So I'll go with partitioning the left-most part of the drive as a dedicated recording partition.

Thanks.
 
Astralogic said:
Its not my OS drive, I just want to maximize the hd write speed, its pretty much fine as it is I just want to get the most I can to limit the odd stutter every now and then.

So I'll go with partitioning the left-most part of the drive as a dedicated recording partition.

Thanks.
Click to expand...

If getting an SSD is out of the question you might want to think about adding another mechanical hard drive or two. (even one that you might have lying around) and striping them. (RAID0)

You can do that either via software or hardware depending on your motherboard.

Just another option to think about.

Good Luck!

~RF
 
I would get a 64 or 120GB SSD and enable tiered storage space with a 5GB write cache. Intel RST and Marvell HyperDuo controllers can do similar caching.
 
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