How To Optimize Your Hard Drive For Speed 

*Wow this guy looks like Linus for some reason...!*

Linus is like a PC ver of Bill Nye the Science Guy. Even when I don't get what he's saying, he still puts up pictures and makes weird sounds and movements to keep me entertained :D

Short stroking... sweet spot... hard drive.... RAM.... computer talk is so dirty

games in the fast partition, movies in the slow one. got it.

I short stroked my storage but now it won't get hard!

It almost sounds like he's saying that people who use mechanical hard drives are in the minority. I think it wouldn't be far off to say that 75% of computer users still use them. Might even be accurate at a higher number.

Fantastic idea... I may implement this. I have a small SSD for OS, and a platter for game storage. I may do this and put the games I play frequently on the faster partition.

Just named my partition for my mechanical drive skippy, and now it magically runs faster! Thanks bro!

"you could've just bought an ssd for that amount." his delivery made me burst out laughing. lol

I usually cover my HDD in cheetah blood to make it go at vroom! vroom! speeds.

I have 2 short-stroked SSHD's in RAID0. Good job on the explanation, Linus. More people should do this.

You are awesome bro. I love the personality, knowledge and environment you put in this video.

Buy a small SSD for the OS, put games on the fast partition of the disc, and movies & music on the slow one :)

6 years later, Linus just helped me not rage at my HardDrive

I think I did this unintentionally when I set up my PC last time. 2TB HDD with a 120GB C partition for boot and the rest as D for storage. After I installed windows again I was surprised how quickly the rig started up when before it would take around 20-30 seconds it now takes maybe 5-8 from cold boot. Amazing how much you can squeeze out of the mechanical construction :D

Hi, If I have SSD where my OS is installed, do I must install all games and programs on SSD itself to get maximum performance? especially games are having huge data these days ?

I learned something new thanks mate

Ok, so I've followed everything in the video. How do I know when I create the partition on Disk Manager that the new partition is being made on the outer rings of the disk and not the inner ones?

how do u set one to be faster than the other one or on the outer tracks

Would changing the NTFS cluster sizes to maximum help improve performance by greatly reducing fragmentation?

In my experience (as limited as that may be), the best way to improve performance on a "platter" HDD, is to just keep it defragmented. Defragging not only the data files, but even the free space (Find a program that will do that - I use Defraggler in cooperation with Windows Disk Defragmenter to get the best results - running each separately, of course, duh). Optimizing, too. I never optimized my HDDs cos I thought optimizing was the same thing as defragging, but recently learned that optimizing just officially clears the data that was deleted from that section of drive, rather than just leaving the data there to be cleared only when new data is being (over)written to that spot. Or something like that... Still, regular defrags (and possibly also optimizations) would probably go a long way to faster disk performance of HDDs, without all that partitioning nonsense. Especially if you're just gonna stress the drive by running games and programs on a partition that is not the OS partition. Seems counter-intuitive and counter-productive to me? Just run the 1 partition. Why complicate things. And as for spending the same amount on a "50GB" HDD as you would for a SSD, does the SSD offer anywhere close to the same storage capacity for the money? I doubt it, lol. I don't trust SSDs. I'd rather sacrifice speed for the chance to recover data in the event of corruption. I mean really, how fast does shit really NEED to go, anyway? You'll save a few seconds here and there? Big whoop... HDDs will allow rescue and recovery better than SSDs since only the affected sectors are concerned with HDD, whereas with SSDs, the whole drive (or at least the affected chip the sector is sitting on) is fucked if even just one small sector is damaged. Or so I have been led to believe.

Dude your voice sounded unusually high pitched in this video ='D

Wow, this was an awesome topic. Can't wait to try it on my sshd Thanks Linus.

where did you find out at which gig was the drop off point

Anyone else tired of Google saying "Did you mean "linux"?" Lolol.

I find it very funny how europeans, americans and canadians talk about "budgets" and how "expensive" an ssd is... costing US$ 90. Here in bbrazil, electronics are so overpriced that simple 250gb ssds range from anything from BRL 500 to BRL 1500. Tell that for a budget-friendly pc. Brilliant trick, NCIX, I will surely do it with my future HD.

so i need to destroy one of the partitions so that i can create 2 new ones one fast and one slow ? any chance that i can do the HDD optimazation without eraseing a partition ? cuz i already installed a bunch of programs and stuff on all of my partitions

umm you said delete the old partitions right? with windows 8 it gives me an option to shrink the size, will that work as well? or should I just go ahead and delete and make new

OMG the subtitles are perfect !

I think every guy uses short strokes lol

Disk management tool ? Where to find it , or download it , please help

Any help please?, do I have to format my drive to do this or can I just shrink the volume? thanks

i still have toshiba 80gb hdd,10 years old... 0kb in bad sectors

How long on average does a HDD last before it dies or becomes unusable or a pain to use?

I actually used everything you mentioned and I've done it on many computers. Thank you

Please correct me if I am wrong: Partitioning a 1Tera hhd will, separate Os in one partition, data on others so I can change the os without affecting the data. Partitions make it easier to defragment because you can defragment different partitions separately and they are smaller so they will defragment faster. Keeping different types of data on different partitions keeps the reading arm on that section of the drive while using that software that accesses that type of data. For example keeping video files for editing on one partition, and storing finished movie files for viewing on another, and word prossesing documents on another, and so on and so forth.

I short stroked my hard drive last night, if you know what I mean.

until you can sell me 10 terabytes worth of SSD for under $200 I am keeping my mechanical drives

Do i need to put OS on short stroke or in low write speed partition

And how exactly do you do that?

Mechanical HDD master race.

Looking at the graph i dont really see a drop off point... there is a slowly increasing fall in the graph, as would be expected. i guess you could set a partition based on what the theoretical minimum read speed should be. That said - ive been looking for a way to speed up my video editing. this will surely help a bit :D feeding the data off the drives has been an issue in terms of speed.

can you add download links on your description?

Thx for Help so how Can i Make that fast partition?

Hah... Overclocking a harddrive....?

how do i know which partition is the fast one? Is it always the first?

OMG, when I compared my SSD to my HHD it was not even close. My EVO 850 completely destroyed my Seagate HHD. I am learning this tech stuff so I'm not as smart as the rest of you, but I was very surprised to learn this. Thank you Linus and crew for the info you put out. You all make it easy and fun to learn!

No, no! It's all wrong!!! You must squeeze it like Michael from Vsauce!

Correction: Not everyone has the budget to run 8 *REFURBISHED* SSDs in RAID0. :)

hi. you said use du disk management to delete all other partition. it's mean excluding C:\ remove all other and make two new. mean 3 partition including C? Please help.

how do I make sure that I have made my hard drive only short stroke. as i have a 1tb hdd I seen that the best was 300gb so im wanting to keep the short stroke within the 300gb and no farther

lil skippy lol

An old HDD Can lower FPS?

to make sure, you just have to create new Simple Volume? they will show both are Primary Partition, just with different letters assigned is that correct ?

There are great software titles available that optimizes hard drives and moves data to the outer edge of the drive and you can really see a speed difference. One of the best software titles I found to do this as well as other optimizations is " Auslogics BoostSpeed".

SSD have a limited re-write ability. the HDD are 100% rewrite-able (they still destroyed 1 day after years of everyday use). btw for developers if you hate that mechanical arm in HDD i suggest you to replace it with laser lines (alot lasers the one after the other and no need for that slow arm to be there, and also, if you put more that just 1 line of lasers in the same face of disc (2, 4 or 8 of them sychronised to work together for 1 search or individual for lots of searches for more independency or mixed [4 can search 1 file while the other 4 are searching another file(s)] you will get it at extreme speed but the cost will be high then) i could not say HDD are slow then but i could say the design of the HDD are unefficiency (my example that i gave before on how to make it faster was great and efficiency [but not money efficiency])

Does this work with WD Black or just WD Blue? (Joke ends here)

wait did i miss something... how do you know that when you create a new partition of xx number of MB, that it'll be created on the faster part of the disk? is it just the order you create it? first is on faster part and second or third is on the rest?

So, from the perspective of a program like "gparted" or even Windows disk manager, you can create a partition at the "begining" of the drive, somewhere in the middle, or at the "end" of the drive. How do I know whether the "beginning of the drive" or "the end of the drive" is on the outer part of disk platter? Don't most drives have multiple platters?

4tb ssd is 1200 dollars lol

Linus, you guys need to fix the echo in the room ur recording in...

One thing I didnt quite understand is at the end wich partition gets the better part, logic say that the first partition would be the slower one and the second the faster one?, so if I have a sda and make a sda1 and sda2, the system and "stuff that I want to run fast" (games) needs to be in sda1 or sda2?, and also, is there a way of doing this without reinstaling?, like defrag and resize? but in that case if I defrag would it be defraged to the fastest point right? I guess that should make sense.

how tdo i do the disk managment thing?

Linus, you gotta work on your "jokes" if you don't wanna sound like a 5-year-old.

You talk way too slow..........I fell asleep......

the outer edge is going to move faster to the reader faster then the center? Wait wed be limiting a lot of the drive just to make it read faster. could be wrong im just asking.

I have one 2TB hdd and the transfer speeds start dip badly at 200GB so if i do like 10 different 200GB partitions would they all have like 150MB transfer speeds?

I didn't understand ... anything

Good job Linus, just one question. Am I supposed to see like another storage drive after slpitting it with that programme?

Here I am, I've been putting all of my main system partitions on the very outside of the hard disk without realizing I was short-stroking. My primary concern is startup time, so this really is just a way to have faster starts and faster permanent program execution. I really ought to do some file-swapping and move some of my more frequently-used programs out of the slower storage partition I use them in and only make symlinks to them on the same partition I keep my non-permanent / "Portable" programs on.

Hey guys i need a little help. i just finished my build by little confused in bios configuration. I want to know which one is better - ide vs ahci . and also legacy vs ufei ? which one is good :) thanks in advance :)

Can u tell us how can we seprate the ssd and the hdd making the full capacity of ssd to be :c drive and the hdd capacity to be the d: drive cuz in the computer it shows us as a one combined drive

How do you partition around that mark to utilize the fastest HDD area? Is the first partition always the fastest outer area of the HDD?

Does it increase speed on raid0? Im only using my raid for scratch disk.

how can i install the os to the speed partation

can you create a video on how to do the partitioning piece?

Is there a way to combine short stroking and raid? So say I took two drives and made two half capacity partitions on both drives, and then set the backup portions to be the two slower partitions? I would think the drive wouldn't be flipping it's arm back and forth between the partitions then, as the slower partitions would only be accessed during backups. This would negate the losses Linus talk about.

Helped me a lot !! Thanks

Very cool, but what makes the 230xxx MB (225 GB or whatever) be created of strictly the outer rim of the plates and the remaining be created of just the inner rim? Does a computer always read/format/partition/ect. from the outside in or vise versa?

I am using my old pc as a nas server but my hdd is to hot how can i slow the hdd down?

subscribed! very good and simple explanation! not too hard to understand! reality rather than purely technical details! thumbs up! :)

So am i supposed to store everything in the fast partition? How do you use the slow partition?

How do I go about moving the desired files to the "fast" partition of the HDD? I'm sort of a noob so the answer may be blatantly obvious, but I'm still confused...

Is it ok to use 3 partitions? 2 fast 1 mid slow?

although i have an ssd for my operating system and a couple of steam games this video is very helpful for my second hard drive

Do I have to format my hard drive if I want to short stroke it?

What if i have both an SSD and a Hard Drive? Can i do this freely with windows on the SSD?

Feasible on a momentus xt?

I can't believe this is the first I'm hearing of this tweak. I've always seen a bunch of discussions about RAID, though in all my web travels I've never seen much talk of short stroking. Of course I've since switched to SSD's and shutter at the thought of ever going back to a painfully slow and noisy mechanical drive, even short stoking them, I'll only use a mechanical for storage or desperation.

how do i do a partition ?

If I do this, does it delete the data off the drive?

so how do you know that the fast partition is on the outer cylinders? Second some drive venders use striping to overcome this where the data is written on the same sector on successive cylinders from outside to in and from in to out. Stripping is commonly used in large storage arrays that use one of the raid technologys.

Will this work if you shrink your current partition and create a new one with the new free space?

Hey there, NCIX is my fav site for parts! So if i just recently wiped all partitions from a hdd and started over and made a 100 gb partition in which to boot a brand new install of windows 10, will windows automatically put that 100 gb partition on the fastest part of the drive?

So what if I put Windows 10 and the Explorer UI in the fast partition side?

That... is a brilliant idea. So simple, yet effective.

I love this guy, upvoted at second 2, you own dude!!

That`s a nice tip :) Never heard of shortstroking before..

wow timing, and this just as i was getting ready to reinstall the os on th old hdd, nice

for those who don't want to format to take advantage of the faster area you can use some 3rd party software you to Defrag by disk zone. one software that comes to mine is Auslogics Disk Defrag. you can make it defrag selective folders into a disk zone, fast normal and slow.