PC Hacks

Chapter 6. Disk Drive Performance Hacks

Introduction: Hacks #58-67

While filesystem choices can have an effect on storage efficiency and performance, the hacks in this chapter address a variety of topics on getting the best raw hardware performance possible from your system board and disk drives. As with most performance-related things, lower timing values and higher clock, rotation, and data transfer speeds yield the best results.

Disk performance is ultimately measured in bytes transferred per second, which can be metered with a variety of benchmarking programs, such as SiSoft Sandra (http://www.sissoftware.net). Such programs can also tell you what the capabilities of your system board and disk drives are so you can determine if the real performance is living up to specification.

The following list describes the capabilities of each type of disk drive interface you're likely to encounter. From this list and a benchmarking program, you can tell what type of changes you can make to improve overall disk performance. Each version of the ATA specification, maintained by the industry trade group T13 (http://t13.org/), covers one or more implementations of technology and performance. You will find a lot of uses of the term ATA— UltraATA, UltraDMA, ATA-33, etc.—on product packages and advertising material. These labels may be misleading, as they can cover a wide range of capabilities from ATA-3 to ATA-5 rather than relating to specific industry standards. Check the product package and ...