ATTO - “The industry’s leading provider of high-performance storage connectivity products” has great products and an excellent benchmarking utility that measures your hard drive’s I/O read/write ability.
Here’s a quick look at a laptop with Windows 7 vs. Server 2008 R2
Dell’s latest 5520 inspiron laptop
6 Gb Memory
500 Gb (Seagate)
Results
2
Server 2008 R2 Custom
8 Gb RAM
2 TB Seagate Hard drive
Results
Also see our #1 post on Hard Drive Benchmarking (other utilites)
The HD Doctor Blog has dozens of Freeware utilities for hard drive information and maintenance. Go check it out.
When tweaking your computer, you can use typical utilities found in one of our most active posts or you can use Winsat. Winsat will not give you fancy graphs but it will give a Windows rating and a time to complete specific tests. This can be a way of measuring your drives between tweaks.
At a command prompt run the following tweak as an administrator:
winsat disk -drive c (you can substitute c with the drive letter of your choice)
DiskBench was designed to measure your hard drive speed but can be used to measure your network transfer speed realistically. With DiskBench, you can use this freeware utility to measure your hard drive speed in my opinion more in accurately because of the way it is designed.
Features
Copy File
Copy Directory
Create File
Read File
Create File Bench
Enter a UNC path to a shared folder and measure your network transfer speed.
This tip has been around for a while but your risk data loss in a power failure if your computer isn’t on a UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) is increased. Because laptops have a battery, this can be an ideal setting.
You may be able to improve your hard drive’s performance in Windows 7 by using this registry tweak. Like any registry tweak, you should have all of your files backed up and make a restore point before trying this out.
Computer hard drives are connected to the controller on the motherboard of the computer. A lot of computers today may have the hard drive configured to use the older IDE interface protocol to communicate with the SATA drive.
If your new hard drive supports NCQ (Native Command Queuing)you may see a performance increase with the drive by following the tweaks below.
An easy solution to switch between IDE and AHCI is to change the following registry key.
Before doing this see if your BIOS has AHCI capabilities
If you are using a RAID adapter on your computer you may try the following:
Don’t forget, the fastest hard drive without IPv6 ….check your network info here
Do you have a SSD Drive? Here’s the optimization tips.
Test Your Hard Drive Speed With Windows 7′s Device Manager – You can test your hard drive speed by going to the Device Manager, Expanding the Hard Drive Controllers, select the Port and Click on the Test button. Make it Faster with (Free – See our Review) DiskMax and Defrag with Auslogics.
How about Roadkil.net’s Disk Speed? A nice little program if your hard drive test isn’t listed under the device manager.
Also check your computer’s hard drive with CheckDiskGUI.
Measure your hard drive speed using Winsat
When tweaking your computer, you can use typical utilities found in one of our most active posts or you can use Winsat. Winsat will not give you fancy graphs but it will give a Windows rating and a time to complete specific tests. This can be a way of measuring your drives between tweaks.
At a command prompt run the following tweak as an administrator:
winsat disk -drive c (you can substitute c with the drive letter of your choice)
ATTO – “The industry’s leading provider of high-performance storage connectivity products” has great products and an excellent benchmarking utility that measures your hard drive’s I/O read/write ability.
Here’s a quick look at a laptop with Windows 7 vs. Server 2008 R2
Dell’s latest 5520 inspiron laptop
6 Gb Memory
500 Gb (Seagate)
Results
2
Server 2008 R2 Custom
8 Gb RAM
2 TB Seagate Hard drive
Results
What about caching programs to speed you up even more?
I’m always cautious when I hear about caching programs. Mickey sent me Bill Mullin’s link over to TechRepublic where Romex’s FancyCache is reviewed.
In its Beta release, FancyCache offers a simplex program that uses unused memory to boost the speed of your hard drive. But does it work? Yes. My Dell Inspirion is already fast, but with FancyCache, programs do open quicker and the computer is even more responsive. With the ability to tweak how I wanted to cache, I used 2gb of the 6gb of RAM on board in the settings.
The default settings alone were convincing enough to show how my computer sped up after a few minutes of use. Although my computer is a 64bit laptop, the caching methods used and the read/write cache algorithms did boost performance.
FancyCache is certainly beneficial for 32 bit users who are locked in at 3gb of RAM. FancyCache can take advantage of memory above this limit to speed up your computer. And whether you do or don’t elect to install FancyCache, at least tweak your settings in a 32 bit computer to tweak your memory. (See our Link)
The only problem I had was once I downloaded the software, it said it was expired. A quick check on their website and keys can be obtained here. The latest key is valid until July 2013.
Will I buy this product? I’m not sure yet, time and use of Fancycache will tell.
What about SSD Drives? Are they faster?
Yes, ATTO on an OCZ Vertex 3
Notice this Benchmark compared to the Seagate 6 Gb/s (above) that was at 70 MB/s this is a 75% increase in speed.
How to measure your hard drive speed.
Check out AMD vs Intel Quad Core Standoff 64 bit Windows 7, 8 gb of RAM 500 gb Seagate Hard Drives
Overclock your Nvidia video card … Link
Upgrading Your Hard Drives Firmware
Find updates for drivers to improve your hard drive speed!
Want to Benchmark your hard drive with Ubuntu?
What’s a fast computer on a slow network? Learn the basics of subnetting without using binary!
Take a look at how we optimize our computers…
See our review of Windows 8 and see how you can run 90% of your programs, virtualize other operating systems, use your network and more.
Check your hard drive with CheckDiskGUI (Credit to Bill Mullins for finding this)
Now go and Tweak your wireless settings!
Collect detailed information about your drives and files.
