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Re: [LUG] Hard Drives

 

While it's true that the slowest part of a modern system is the HDD and speed increases can be found in partial stroking (i.e. only using the most efficient part of the disk head movement wise) HDDs will always be in an entirely different league to an SSD. If you want high sequential read/writes (i.e. transferring big files quickly) then raid 0 or raid 1 are decent options however these will have little effect on day to day usage. If you want low random access times (for day to day usage) then your only real option is an SSD or maybe a physical RAM drive if you have the money required (see ACARD 9010), there are however a few little tricks you can use to speed up your machine for free:

1) Create a virtual RAM drive if you have enough memory, these can be used for steps 2 and 3...
2) Move your temporary cache into this space, means web pages can be loaded faster as you're not waiting for a random space on the HDD to become accessible
3) Move your page file into RAM - I know this sounds like a silly idea but for some reason a page file will always be used even if you only ever use 1% of your memory for program use, so move the page file and the only time things will go badly wrong is if you run out of space in RAM.  
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