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Is it possible to overclock a harddrive?

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devarinti

Weaksauce
Joined
Feb 15, 2009
Messages
74
I am fairly new to the whole overclocking scene although I find it fun and have gotten the hang of it fairly well. I want to see if its possible to overclock an old school IDE harddrive or overclocking any harddrive in general?

Any suggestions would be great.
 
devarinti said:
I am fairly new to the whole overclocking scene although I find it fun and have gotten the hang of it fairly well. I want to see if its possible to overclock an old school IDE harddrive or overclocking any harddrive in general?

Any suggestions would be great.
Click to expand...

Modify a 12V molex connector to provide 18v or 24v and see it spin much faster for at least a split second.

On a more serious note: there is no "clock" in a harddrive (except on the logic board but that's not anything to be concerned about at this point :p ) so there is no over"clocking" either.
 
Considering the fact a hard drive is not a solid-state device and has actual moving parts in it that operate at fairly high speeds and microscopically small tolerances, I wouldn't even dare thinking about making any changes to it outside of its design that would make it work differently.
 
There is no overclocking a mechanical hard drive voltage wise, If you got the platters to spin faster then data would just get scrambled, also cause wear on the spindle or just straight out killing it from overvolting.

You could look around for firmware or factory floppy discs with utilities that shipped with that came with the drive, some drives would let you speed up the drive at the cost of noise.
 
RogueTrip said:
There is no overclocking a mechanical hard drive voltage wise, If you got the platters to spin faster then data would just get scrambled, also cause wear on the spindle or just straight out killing it from overvolting.

You could look around for firmware or factory floppy discs with utilities that shipped with that came with the drive, some drives would let you speed up the drive at the cost of noise.
Click to expand...

The "speedups in cost of noise" are sometimes noticeable. It does not make the drive spin any faster, it just mainly increases the speed at which the head can move back and forth from what it looks like to me.

Also, if you are overclocking the PCI bus on your motherboard, it will affect effective transfer rates of the hard drive as well. 36Mhz is usually safe, with some boards able to handle 38Mhz. Newer boards have the PCI bus locked at 33Mhz.
 
Even if this were completely impractical and destroy the drive... it still would be pretty fun.
 
There is no way and also point to overclock hard drives. Reading and wiriting speed of HDD is fixed non changeable value.;)
 
Sigh, noobs...

When video card manufacturers (like XFX) have model numbers with proceeding "XXX+" they are indeed talking about high clocks, etc...

But when hard drives and file servers have models that end in "XXX" they are stating the contents of the data stored...

Nothing more...
 
Yes there is a way to overclock a hard drive...

Upgrade from a 5400 rpm to a 7200 rpm then to a 10,000 rpm VelociRaptor. :)

There, now you overclocked it. Silly me
 
The only realistic overclock you can get for the hard drive is to boost the host bus speed of the SATA controller.
This will give a proportionally higher burst speed.
Burst speed means very little though and you risk damaging the SATA controller or the interface on the hard drive.
 
I wonder if ram drives have overclocking utilities and if a clockspeed increase between 800 and 1066mhz is more noticeable in that scenario.
 
well now that i know there is no real such thing and if i tried anything it'd be rather dangerous I guess I won't waste my time over it. Well thanks anyway for your responses everyone.
 
cyclone3d said:
Also, if you are overclocking the PCI bus on your motherboard, it will affect effective transfer rates of the hard drive as well. 36Mhz is usually safe, with some boards able to handle 38Mhz. Newer boards have the PCI bus locked at 33Mhz.
Click to expand...
That usually only affects older boards though. Newer chipsets do not run the SATA controllers off the PCI bus (except for some that use external drive controllers). Mind you, newer drives also aren't limited in their transfer rates by the speed of the SATA interface.
 
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