How to Optimize Performance for Disk Drives

Video Transcript

"Disk drives encompass not just hard drives, but also flash disk drives, like memory, memory sticks, SD cards, things that you'd put in your camera, things like that. How do you optimize it? Well, you pretty much defragment the media in any type or fashion. What that does, it allows the speed time of whatever operation that you're doing to go faster. So, say for instance, if you're going from one room to another, if you had a moving sidewalk rather than just walking yourself, you would undoubtedly get there a lot faster. That's generally what defragmenting does. Also, for Windows, making it boot faster based on your disk drive is increasing your page file, which allows your Windows to operate a little bit better and it capitalizes on a larger capacity hard drive for a larger page file. So, paging is basically speeding up Windows based on your hard drive, not, per se, the actual hard drive itself. Also, disk performance is based on the connector that you're using. So, if say, for instance, you're using an IDE-based hard drive, which are older connectors, verses SETA hard drives, which are the newer connectors, you're undoubtedly going to get faster performance out of the SETA drives, because the actual connection bus is a lot faster. So, better hardware equals faster performance as well. Just keep that in mind as well. With flash drives, you really can't speed them up. You can defragment them, but the connection that they use is the connection that they use and that's generally it. One thing you want to notice with flash drives, though, transference from a USB hard drive that uses the old type spin-up hard drives. In the flash hard drive, you'll notice the flash hard drive is a lot faster, because there's no moving parts. So, if you use, say an SD card for storage on some of the newer laptops, verses a flash memory stick, you'll notice that's a little bit faster, too, because the connection for a flash card is a lot faster than a connection for USB. So, just keep that in mind, as well. Flash memory is going to be a lot faster than traditional spindles and all that stuff instead of a hard drive."