Ways to improve HDD performance?

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Currently I have a pretty bad HDD, WD 250 GB harddrive, probably 5200 RPM or however much it is.

I defragment often but I am not satisfied with the current performance and can't afford a better one right now, so I'm wondering if there are any tips/tricks to improve it.

I just enabled the Advanced Performance thing under device manager in Vista, but I'm hoping for more
 
In your bios, you may have some options for "noise reduction" I forget the actual term....but you can set it for quiet or performance/bypass.
Also AAM...this can be changed with tools such as HDTune.
 
How full is it? If you are running close to full, that will have a bad effect on performance that defragging will not help much.

Run the benchmarks from HD Tune on it and compare it to drives of similar vintage to see if there is any room to improve things. If it's already running as fast as it can, you are facing an uphill battle.

Don
 
If you have a 5400 rpm drive your not going to get very good performance from anyway....I know you said you dont have much money to spend on stuff but $85 will get you a WD6400AAKS one the fastest drives out there.
 
Ouch, that drive is incredibly slow, especially in Vista.

Get the 6400AAKS, it's an amazing drive. In fact I have 2 in raid 0 and it's incredible for $170. I used 1 for about 90 days and it was extremely fast. Fastest desktop drive you can buy (7200).
 
Sadly that drive is very slow compared to todays drives.
The best drives are the Western Digital 640GB 6400AAKS as bigdogchris mentioned and the Samsung 1TB SpinPoint F1 HD103UJ, they are both very well priced too!
Both drives use 330GB platters which have the highest data density of any IDE drive.

I received my 1TB F1 a few days ago, its really quick.
Average read speed of over 92MB/s.
To get a comparison of how yours performs, run HD Tune.
http://www.hdtune.com/
 
My HD is 50.5 GB full out of 250 GB.

I'm also not really interested in big drives, and I'm hoping to get a Raptor 70GB which will be sufficient for me sometime in the near future. Until then, though, I'm stuck with this drive, so just looking to squeeze as much performance as I can out of it while I have it. =/

Will run HDTune in a second

Results: 47.2 MB/s :(
 
Tylerdurdened said:
I'm also not really interested in big drives, and I'm hoping to get a Raptor 70GB which will be sufficient for me sometime in the near future. Until then, though, I'm stuck with this drive, so just looking to squeeze as much performance as I can out of it while I have it. =/
Click to expand...
With the exception of the new Velociraptor drives, the WD 640GB drive actually performs on par with if not better than the all of the older Raptor drives. You're better off with the WD 640GB drive.
 
Danny Bui said:
With the exception of the new Velociraptor drives, the WD 640GB drive actually performs on par with if not better than the all of the older Raptor drives. You're better off with the WD 640GB drive.
Click to expand...

you serious? got a newegg link or something i might be interested! or are u referring to all of the WD 640GB?
 
Southend said:
you serious? got a newegg link or something i might be interested! or are u referring to all of the WD 640GB?
Click to expand...

AFAIK, there's only one Western Digital 640GB drive out there. But just in case and for future reference, the model number is WD6400AAKS as Nenu said.
 
Tylerdurdened said:
My HD is 50.5 GB full out of 250 GB.

I'm also not really interested in big drives, and I'm hoping to get a Raptor 70GB which will be sufficient for me sometime in the near future. Until then, though, I'm stuck with this drive, so just looking to squeeze as much performance as I can out of it while I have it. =/

Will run HDTune in a second

Results: 47.2 MB/s :(
Click to expand...

It's obviously not too full. The performance doesn't look too awful bad, specially if it is really a 5400 rpm drive. What was the average seek time?

You would have to find the exact model number of your drive and then just google hdtune results for your drive.

You may also want to go to WD website, grab their HD diagnostic progrm from the support section (the DOS CD version is best,) and run the full test on your drive just to make sure it aint starting to go south on you. You can also take a quick look under the health tab on HD Tune to see if you have any SMART issues creeping up. HD Tune should also list the model number there for you so you don't have to open the case to read the label.

My old Maxtor 40 gig drive gets 49.4 MB/S with 14.7 MS access. It is a 7200 rpm drive.

My Seagate 7200.11 drive gets 78.6 MB/s with 12.8 MS access.

Don
 
DonDon said:
It's obviously not too full. The performance doesn't look too awful bad, specially if it is really a 5400 rpm drive. What was the average seek time?

You would have to find the exact model number of your drive and then just google hdtune results for your drive.

You may also want to go to WD website, grab their HD diagnostic progrm from the support section (the DOS CD version is best,) and run the full test on your drive just to make sure it aint starting to go south on you. You can also take a quick look under the health tab on HD Tune to see if you have any SMART issues creeping up. HD Tune should also list the model number there for you so you don't have to open the case to read the label.

My old Maxtor 40 gig drive gets 49.4 MB/S with 14.7 MS access. It is a 7200 rpm drive.

My Seagate 7200.11 drive gets 78.6 MB/s with 12.8 MS access.

Don
Click to expand...
Nevermind apparently it is 7200 RPM, Access is 13.9
 
Alright, seek time sounds ok. Do you have the specific model number. The read numbers seem s little low, but I would have to check to make sure.

Don
 
DonDon said:
Alright, seek time sounds ok. Do you have the specific model number. The read numbers seem s little low, but I would have to check to make sure.

Don
Click to expand...

WD2500JS, no worries though, even if they are low there's nada I can do about it
 
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