Can you speed up hard drive performance? The answer is yes. There are a lot of well known ways to speed up hard performance and this tutorial will show you how. However, there are a few little known tricks that will allow you get more speed from your hard disk.
Traditional Ways to Speed Up Your Hard Drive
Step 1: Organize Your Filing System
The best way to do this is with the defrag option. The defrag option will allow you to “defragment” your disorganized hard drive. The more time it takes the hard drive to find a file, the more times it stays in use which leads to slow down. Follow the sequence below.
Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools and > Disk Defragment
Step 2: Fix the Errors
Bad sectors and errors can cause your hard drive to slow down considerably. You will need to scan your computer for errors. Windows has “chkdsk” and “error checking” both of these scanning commands will fix your filing system and bad hard drive sectors.
Start >Computer > Right Click the Hard Drive > Properties > Error Checking
Step 3: More RAM
RAM can can take the pressure off your hard drive. It will load the data into a temp space instead of constantly accessing the hard drive. If you are not willing to upgrade your physical RAM, this can easily be done using Virtual RAM option.
Step 4: Use Power Options.
Making sure your hard drive has enough power to run effectively is very important. If you are using a power option that are meant to save power, your hard drive is going to slow down. If you want to focus on ways to speed up hard drive performance, you need to crank up the power to the hard drive. An easy way to do this is use High Performance power options in Windows.
Start > Control Panel > System and Security > Power Options > Show Additional Plans > High Performance
Step 5: Creating More Disk Space.
You should definitely have able free disk space on your hard drive to ensure that is is running efficiently. The reason for this is the free space is utilize as a temp space that allows data to be easily loaded there while resource are used for other functions such as your CPU. You can use Disk Cleanup to purge your system of useless files. For more ways to clean up your hard drive and computer, click here.
More Advanced Ways to Speed Up Hard Drive Performance
1. Use Write Caching
This is a Windows 7 and 8 function that allows your hard drive to access more of the the RAM instead of constantly writing data to the hard drive.
2. Dump Crash Data
You should dump crash data files because they will eventually eat up your disk space and slow down your hard to a crawl.
