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| The Well-Tuned PC |
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Home Base May 2006 • Vol.4 Issue 5 Page(s) 77-78 in print issue |
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The Well-Tuned PC Disk Hygiene |
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 Dave Methvin is chief technology officer of PC Pitstop, a free site that automatically diagnoses and fixes common PC problems. Contact Dave at dave@pctoday.com  A PC’s disk drive is a pretty unique component of most systems nowadays. It’s about the only part that always has to be in physical motion whenever you’re using the system. Drives spin pretty fast—from 5,400 to 10,000 revolutions per minute—but even at that speed they usually end up being one of the slowest components in the system. Regular disk tune-ups can make a big difference in system performance.  Golden Performance Rule This one rule tells you everything you need to know about why good disk hygiene is so important: The more data that is on a drive, the slower it will be. When a drive is nearly empty, it is at its fastest. The drive’s read/write heads hardly have to move at all to reach any file, and even the empty space is close at hand when Windows needs to create a new file. As the drive fills, though, the disk read/write heads have to move longer and longer distances; that takes more time and makes the system slower. Similarly, as the drive begins to fill up, it becomes harder for Windows to find a place to put new files. Quite often, Windows will end up splitting a file into pieces and putting those pieces in the holes left by files that were deleted. This is called fragmentation, and it’s a real performance buzzkill, as well. The “full drives are slower”rule should also guide your decisions about how large a drive to buy for a new system. If you put 75GB of files on a 100GB drive, it will usually be slower than if you put that same 75GB of on a 200GB drive. Bigger drives often have more platters, mo.... |
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