Charles The Technician
Wisdom and Rants from a Computer / Network Technician
3rd
DEC
Myth Busting: HD Space != Speed*.
Posted by Charles | Filed under Rants
Alot of people have this silly notion that if they had more space on their hard drive that it would improve the speed of their computer.
These are usually the same people that at one point or another started considering what was important in the C:\Windows\System32 folder and what they didn’t need anymore, and brought it in the shop dumbfounded with how deleting anything as silly as KERNEL32.DLL could possibly be a bad thing. Because, who needs 32 pieces of popcorn in their system after all?
Look, the only time hard drive space is EVER going to effect your computers speed is when you get down to VERY LITTLE space, like to the point that the Virtual Memory / Swap Memory isn’t able to grab space. You would have to be down to less then a half a Gigabyte of space for this to occur. And if you have THAT small of space, you might as well delete one of those DVD Rips such as Debby Does Dallas 2: AGAIN!!!. I haven’t seen it but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t all that good anyways.
The main portions of your computer that effect your speed you won’t be able to effect. They are your processor (Which you can upgrade TO A CERTAIN POINT), Your System Bus speed, which you cannot change at all, and your amount/speed of RAM you can add too the amount of ram you have, but the speed is determined by your motherboard.
Another option that is sort of rare unless you have a 5+ year old computer is to add in a PCI IDE card, if your computer is running on a slower DMA speed then anything in the last 2 years then you throw in a IDE card you can speed up the pace of your hard drive. Go google it if you think this is your case.
So next time your 3rd cousin removed by marriage shows up at your family reunion and says “DELETE SOME FILES AND DEFRAG FOR SPEED!!!111″ tell them your not first cousins and that should disqualify you from their list of people they are attracted too.
Love,
Charles~
* != is a way of saying “Does not equal”
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December 3, 2006 -
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Now, I can see the minimal gains one could make by defragging in the case of a computer that is cluttered like the attic of a grandmother living the same house for sixty-eight years.
If someone really is that irritated by the half-second that the hard drive takes to search, locate, and open a file, they shouldn’t be looking to speed things up. They should be looking for a bottle of lithium.
I’m surprised they’re not pimping that partitioning drives to take advantage of the longer data strings on the outside of the HDD platter. “Draw your small files from the inner-platter, man!”. Hippie shit like that.
Microsoft was kind enough to add a bit of idiot-proofing the Windows XP in the form of the warning that comes with the first time you try to access folders on the main drive, basically saying “Don’t fuck with these files unless you know what you’re doing and you have a good reason for doing so”.
Naturally, that doesn’t stop Candy McDouche from deleting KERNEL32.DLL.
Now, locking the end-users out of these files would be good, if it wouldn’t pretty much kill much of your business. I suppose being paid for these idiot’s mistakes is almost worth the aggravation.
Still, no one will blame you for going on a multi-state shooting spree down the road.
Not to offend, but actually hard drive space does in fact affect the speed of your computer. Once you have filled up your hard drive over about half, the processor has to look through more information to find what it needs. So, if you have a 200GB drive, and there’s only 50GB of info to look through, it’s a lot faster than looking through 199GB of info. It depends on your type of hard drive, processor speed, and motherboard socket, but it can affect it, especially on older systems.
You missed the class on File allocation Tables. The CPU nor anything else just scans the entire HD till it finds what it needs. The HD looks at the FAT then figures out what sector the data is on by that pointer then goes to that sector. It’s a process that takes literally thousandths of a second.
If computers operated in the manner in which you state then if you happened to have a file on the very last sector of your HD it would take upwards of 30 seconds for your computer to find that file. BULLSHIT.
You also missed the class on DMA, the processor initiates the call then lets the DMA controler take over while the CPU does something else. The CPU doesn’t do any of that work.l
Let me show you what happends when your CPU does all that work. Go into Device Manager, expand “IDE CONTROLERS”, double click on “Primary IDE Controller” then click on the second tab at the top, then where it says “DMA If Available”, switch that to “PIO mode only” Now watch as your computer literally takes 30 minutes to boot up even if it does boot up at all…(Hint: I don’t really recommend this for anyone)
“Alot faster” = 1ms faster = un-noticeable.
The purpose of the post was the fact that with most windows users the problem isn’t HD space, it’s spyware / virii / useless junk cluttering the starup app’s. Yet I find more and more “If I uninstall this, or delete this folder it will speed up my computer” style logic from the average user.
By the way, I’m not your first cousin.
Love,
Charles~
I find that many people out there get Memory and HD space confused. A lot.
“So my computer has 500gig’s that means it has LOTS of memory right?”
I feel your pain.
I didn’t intend hostility, but obviously you took it that way. I don’t know where you get off telling me I’m a liar and/or an idiot. You obviously misunderstood what I said, that’s your fault not mine.
I’m an asshole, get over it hippie.
Your a self-proclaimed geek who thinks the CPU manually scans each sector until it comes across the file it wants.
You state your synaptic misfires with the confidence of someone who discovered that 2+2 is 6 but fat fingered the calculator and refuses to see if he made a mistake. (By the way 2+2=4)
You’re not a liar or an idiot, you’re ignorant, willfully or otherwise. If it’s willfully, and I think it is because you actually do seem to possess the ability to figure this sort of stuff out, then that’s worse then being an idiot. An idiot can’t help it. You can, you just choose not too.
If you think I misunderstood you, point out what you meant or say what you meant. Because this is how I interpreted it:
So, if you have a 200GB drive, and there’s only 50GB of info to look through…
appears to mean that you think the HD scans each sector till it finds what it needs. This is a common misconception among people who also belong to the defrag cult.
the processor has to look through more
appears to mean you think the processor does all the work, it doesn’t. Again your wrong, the processor doesn’t look through ANYTHING. It says “Call this data, push to this segment of memory” and the DMA controller buses it on down to where it needs to go. Again a common misconception among people who belong to the defrag cult.
So you have 2 choices:
1.) Get the fuck off my website and go educate yourself.
2.) Show me where I’m wrong (I suggest #1 first though so you at least have your shit straight and don’t mumble shit about defragging.)
Fuck you,
Charles~
Dammit, now you tell me. One computer down, two to go!
Wow. I’m not even gonna embarrass myself by telling you how much I don’t know about computers. I don’t understand a thing you were talking about up there (waaaaayyyyyyy over my head)…but I do like the way ya said it!
The butterfly wanted to come and say HI…
[…] OK first things first, more HD space does not mean faster computer, GET THIS IDEA OUT OF YOUR HEAD, WHERE THE FUCK DOES IT COME FROM I WANT TO KNOW SO I CAN LOBOTOMIZE THE PERSON THAT STARTED THIS. […]