Can Your Hard Drive Effect Performance?

Discussion in 'PC hardware help' started by lassise, Sep 14, 2008.

  1. lassise

    lassise Member

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    I recently reformatted my computer and changed the hard drive. I believe I have a 'Seagate Technology - Barracuda 7200.10 SATA 3.0Gb/s 250-GB Hard Drive' after doing a little googling. The drive is about 3-4 years old. I transfered a lot of my files from my newer hard drive on to this one when I reformatted. I have virus scans / spyware scans going all the time, its most likely not a virus. My question is if I bought a new hard drive and reformatted again would my computer perform better than it is now, or is storage space just storage space and I'm paranoid?

    Thanks
     
    lassise, Sep 14, 2008
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  2. sammorris

    sammorris Senior member

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    Only if the hard disk is close to full (<50GB free) or fragmented considerably will it cause performance loss. A newer 7200rpm drive won't make much difference, the 7200.10s aren't much slower than current gen drives, other than the expensive 10k drives.
     
    sammorris, Sep 14, 2008
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  3. jony218

    jony218 Guest

    If your drive is set to PIO instead of DMA, that will slow down the hard drive. Sometimes a drive will revert to PIO.

    Also if there is file corruption on the hard drive that will cause slowdow. A scandisk with the box to fix errors checked can fix that.
     
    jony218, Sep 14, 2008
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  4. sammorris

    sammorris Senior member

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    S-ATA hard disks can never revert to PIO as PIO does not exist for S-ATA drives. However, Scandisk and Defragment is recommended.
     
    sammorris, Sep 14, 2008
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  5. EricCarr

    EricCarr Regular member

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    Here's what I have done.

    I bought a sata HDD. It doesn't really matter the size. Anything over 160GB will be fine. Use this HDD to install your Windows and updates and install your programs, games. All you keep on the drive is programs and games. You may save things to the desktop but if you want to keep anything, back it up on the other drive I am about to mention.
    If you are only using this drive this way. The computer will run very nice.

    Now go buy a larger HDD. 500gb to TB will be good. You will need to buy a Enclosure drive 3.5 will be perfect. This will connect USB to your PC.

    This is where you store all your music, pictures, install files, porn, movies. ect ect ect.




     
    EricCarr, Sep 14, 2008
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  6. sammorris

    sammorris Senior member

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    That's the way to do it. For lightning fast OS loading, however, I would recommend a 10krpm Drive, for example the WD VelociRaptor - the 150GB version is much cheaper than the 300, and 300GB on a system drive is excessive anyway.
     
    sammorris, Sep 14, 2008
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