Can I short stroke my single HD?

[Sub0]

I hope you all don't mind me asking so many questions, but I have been reading a lot about "short stroking" HD's. I was wondering do I have to have a raid 0 set up in order to short stroke or can i do it with my single HD's. If so can some one please tell me how to short stroke.

[Phobia]

Originally Posted by Sub0

If so can some one please tell me how to short stroke.

sorry for being off topic, but: teehee

[enaberif]

Originally Posted by Sub0

I hope you all don't mind me asking so many questions, but I have been reading a lot about "short stroking" HD's. I was wondering do I have to have a raid 0 set up in order to short stroke or can i do it with my single HD's. If so can some one please tell me how to short stroke.

Only RAID.

[Sub0]

Originally Posted by Phobia

sorry for being off topic, but: teehee

Maybe the fact that it's 1am here but that took a while to sink in. ( in Nova Scotia btw)

[CanadaRox]

You could easily just partition off the first part of your HDD and it would have a similar affect to short stroking but not as drastic. You could also just use an efficient defrag tool such as O&O, which not only defrags your HDD, but it will also has different types of organization so that common used files are on the faster part of the HDD. You could also partition off part for your OS (~30GB) and then use the rest for apps/storage, which should help with boot times and general OS usage.

[CMetaphor]

You can short stroke a single disk WITHOUT having to raid it as you wish. Use the manufacturers diagnostic disk (Seatools for Seagate, Western Digital Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for WD drives) to reduce the number of sectors to a fraction of what they would normally be (normally 10%).

Contrary to what others may say, you might get close to the same performance by partitioning off the disk, but i doubt it. Why? Because the other partition, the second it is used, is slowing down your OS partition. The heads on the disk can only be in one place at one time. So if your antivirus runs, indexing, ANY hard disk access on the second partition... the benefit of your OS/games/whatever being on a separate partition are GONE.

Short stroking will improve performance, because not only will you keep the all the data on one smaller partition/disk than the rest, but the heads of the disk don't have to move nearly as much. THIS is the reason for short stroking, reducing the capacity of the hard drive in order to improve performance.

[Sub0]

Thanks for all the help. Now that my 2X drives are in RAID0 do I short stroke them before or after I put the operating system on?.....also how do I go about short stroking them?

[CMetaphor]

As i explained you have to short stroke them First. So, before you set your Sata controller to raid, boot off the hard drive manufacturers diagnostic disk then set yuor sectors to be 1/10th of the original (basically just take the number of sectors your see there, but dont enter the last digit). THEN set your sata controller to raid mode, boot into the raid controller, create your raid array, and install your OS on it.

[Sub0]

I have 2X Western Digital Caviar Black 640's. When I boot of the CD I get these options (see list below) which option to I pick to set the sectors?
QUICK TEST
EXTENDED TEST
WRITE ZEROS TO DRIVE
VIEW TEST RESULTS
PRINT TEST RESULTS
LOG FILE OPEN/CLOSE
ENTER AND PRINT RMA INFORMATION

I am amusing that I have to do this for both drives right?

[Sub0]

For anyone who is interested the Western Digital Data Lifeguard Diagnostic no longer supports short stroking...it is just a disk diagnostic tool acording to WD support.