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Make HD work faster??

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buel

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Posted December 29, 2012 at 8:28PM

Hi, I seem to remember reading a few months ago how you can make the HD work faster but may make it slightly unstable? I Googled it and couldn't find the exact one but i did find this:

http://www.softmyhard.com/windows/make-your-sata-hard-disk-work-faster

Am i being stupid here or is it worth doing please?

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buel

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Posted December 29, 2012 at 8:32PM

Hmmm....I see that my HD is NTFS.

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northumbria61

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Posted December 29, 2012 at 8:33PM

That's what mine has always been set to without any problems.

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Fruit Bat /\0/\

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Posted December 29, 2012 at 10:05PM

NTFS is faster and more efficient than Fat32 (although if using XP a fat32 drive will give a faster shutdown time)

Write caching is enabled by default in Windows

IDE drives are slow if in PIO mode and need to be rest to DMA mode 5 if possible (not applicable to SATA drives, which is one of the reasons IDE HDDs are almost unavailable)

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lotvic

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Posted December 29, 2012 at 10:45PM

Is it just me or is anyone else having trouble finding the relevance between the info in the above posts? Each makes sense on it's own, but.....

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buel

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Posted December 30, 2012 at 10:22AM

Hmmm.....I just thought that was because I have limited intelligence? :0)

So, please can I confirm that there is a way to 'speed up' a NTFS HD?

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Fruit Bat /\0/\

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Posted December 30, 2012 at 11:03AM

Works for XP

Run SYSEDIT.EXE from the Run command.

Expand the system.ini file window.

Scroll down almost to the end of the file till you find a line called [386enh].

Press Enter to make one blank line, and in that line type

Irq14=4096

Note: This line IS CASE SENSITIVE!!!

Click on the File menu, then choose Save.

Close SYSEDIT and reboot your computer.

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Fruit Bat /\0/\

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Posted December 30, 2012 at 11:14AM

Having enough memory and keeping the pagefile to a minimum helps

Using USB sticks as ready boost has the same effect

Enabling write caching as previously stated.

Making sure the drive is defragged so file location is quicker

see here

Also getting your initial partition size right is supposed to help (seems to work for my XP machine run it in a 10g partition) and pagefile on a separate drive.

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buel

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Posted December 30, 2012 at 12:52PM

Apologies, I have made the schoolboy error of not stating that my laptop is Vista! I am sory for this! :0(

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Fruit Bat /\0/\

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Posted December 30, 2012 at 1:07PM

The theory is the same for all windows versions. except XP cannot use ready boost.

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buel

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Posted December 30, 2012 at 2:32PM

Thank you.

I typed SYSEDIT.EXE in to Run and got multiple windows up with the message 'C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT. Cannot open this file'?

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