Congrats ,
your contribution to "When is the Storage Industry
going to "Get with it?"" has been selected
as the Best Answer.
Click here to review this thread: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum//forum2.php?config=tomshardwareus.inc&cat=32&post=264068&page=1&p=1
Thank you for contributing the Tom's Hardware community
The Tom's Hardware community team
New URL:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/264068-32-when-storage-industry
Best solution
Storage Expert
If
you are willing to do some "manual" data management,
there are certain things you can do right now that will
accelerate storage across the board.
First of all, in order to implement an effective data management
strategy, a careful and realistic distinction needs to be made
between "most recently used" data and "least recently used"
data
-- and possibly a third data set in between those 2.
Modern computers already make decisions like that,
in the absence of any direct intervention by the user:
demand paging comes to mind, but there are other examples.
A well designed ramdisk can do wonders: we have moved
all of our browser caches into ramdisks managed by
RamDisk Plus, developed by SuperSpeed
LLC:
http://www.supremelaw.org/systems/superspeed/RamDiskPlu...
Short-stroking the OS partition on a rotating platter
will reduce armature wear, minimize access times,
and exploit the fact that there is always more data
on the outermost tracks: this is so because modern
HDDs do maintain at or near the same recording density
from outermost to innermost tracks.
Moving the swap file e.g. pagefile.sys on Windows systems,
to a short-stroked partition, created with the Contig
freeware
so as to be perfectly contiguous internally, is another way to
harness parallelism when a system must do concurrent I/O
to/from data files at or near the same time it is doing I/O
to/from the swap file.
Now, at the other extreme, we find lots of examples like
image files of the OS partition: these tend to be large,
sequential files that will probably not be READ very often,
if ever, relatively speaking.
Although there may be situations in which the WRITE speed
when creating a drive image is very important, in our experience
this task tends to be done best as a background / batch task
that can finish when it finishes: its sheer speed is a lot less
important that the integrity of each drive image created by that task.
The lesson here is to learn as much as you can about the
kinds of storage your system(s) do, and allocate files
in an intelligent fashion so that the most frequently used files
are stored on the fastest available storage, while less frequently
used files are stored in slower storage.
The predictable benefits of such an intelligent allocation
are measurable, and substantial.
MRFS