Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
March 28, 2024, 11:36:17 AM

Login with username, password and session length

Search:     Advanced search
we're back, baby
*
Home Help Search Login Register
f13.net  |  f13.net General Forums  |  Gaming  |  Topic: Performance Tuning Windows 7 0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
Pages: 1 [2] Go Down Print
Author Topic: Performance Tuning Windows 7  (Read 16431 times)
Engels
Terracotta Army
Posts: 9029

inflicts shingles.


Reply #35 on: February 11, 2010, 08:58:28 PM

From what I have gathered, it can make a significant difference with larger drives. The needle hardly has to travel if its all written on the edge of a 1 TB drive, while on a smaller disk, say a 160 GB drive, it won't matter as much. This is anecdotal.

I should get back to nature, too.  You know, like going to a shop for groceries instead of the computer.  Maybe a condo in the woods that doesn't even have a health club or restaurant attached.  Buy a car with only two cup holders or something. -Signe

I LIKE being bounced around by Tonkors. - Lantyssa

Babies shooting themselves in the head is the state bird of West Virginia. - schild
Salamok
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2803


Reply #36 on: February 11, 2010, 09:59:33 PM

From what I have gathered, it can make a significant difference with larger drives. The needle hardly has to travel if its all written on the edge of a 1 TB drive, while on a smaller disk, say a 160 GB drive, it won't matter as much. This is anecdotal.

I would still think disk thrashing caused by excessive fragmenting would be a much greater performance inhibitor.  Data density on a 1tb drive is insane and pretty much all of them are using perpendicular recording where this may not the case with a 160gb drive, basically if you have your OS files in a contiguous space on the slowest part of a 1tb drive it is probably going to be faster than the fastest contiguous space available on a 160gb drive.  Naturally there are exceptions such as the raptor/velociraptor drives but even then the top of class 10k rpm drive's only have a minimal speed advantage vs. a decent mid grade 1tb drive.
Engels
Terracotta Army
Posts: 9029

inflicts shingles.


Reply #37 on: February 11, 2010, 10:29:56 PM

Well, sure, the first steps are defragging and then contiguous files, but we're going full throttle nerd here.

I should get back to nature, too.  You know, like going to a shop for groceries instead of the computer.  Maybe a condo in the woods that doesn't even have a health club or restaurant attached.  Buy a car with only two cup holders or something. -Signe

I LIKE being bounced around by Tonkors. - Lantyssa

Babies shooting themselves in the head is the state bird of West Virginia. - schild
Kageh
Terracotta Army
Posts: 359


Reply #38 on: February 12, 2010, 12:26:17 AM

Edit: Just realised that the operative phrase in this discussion is 'at the start of your disk'. Sorry, in that dept, I got nutin.

I would worry more about a defragged section for the OS before stressing over where it is on the disk, you would think position on the disk wouldn't matter as much on a cutting edge hard drive.

For a real world scenario, position matters about as much or more than defragmentation nowadays. Defragmentation is a legacy thing from the days when random seek times were killing drives. Although both are more likely to only have a noticeable impact in cases where you are doing reading/writing on really huge files (in the GB and above size) or lots of I/Os in a very short time (which can be a factor depending on how for example a game uses thousands of individual files).

Number-wise, there's often about 20-30% loss in sequential I/O performance on the outer regions of a 1TB drive compared to the center. Whereas you're not losing 30%  performance on unfragmented vs. fragmented drives unless there's really LOTS of fragmentation. HDTach is pretty good for pointing that out.
Engels
Terracotta Army
Posts: 9029

inflicts shingles.


Reply #39 on: February 12, 2010, 07:16:26 AM

Quote
Number-wise, there's often about 20-30% loss in sequential I/O performance on the outer regions of a 1TB drive compared to the center

Do you mean the other way around? The greater the circumference of a disk, the less the needle's spindle/disk axel has to turn, so the farther from the center the faster, goes my logic.
« Last Edit: February 12, 2010, 07:18:02 AM by Engels »

I should get back to nature, too.  You know, like going to a shop for groceries instead of the computer.  Maybe a condo in the woods that doesn't even have a health club or restaurant attached.  Buy a car with only two cup holders or something. -Signe

I LIKE being bounced around by Tonkors. - Lantyssa

Babies shooting themselves in the head is the state bird of West Virginia. - schild
Kageh
Terracotta Army
Posts: 359


Reply #40 on: February 12, 2010, 07:52:09 AM

Quote
Number-wise, there's often about 20-30% loss in sequential I/O performance on the outer regions of a 1TB drive compared to the center

Do you mean the other way around? The greater the circumference of a disk, the less the needle's spindle/disk axel has to turn, so the farther from the center the faster, goes my logic.

You are correct, I had that wrong. I got confused in my initial interpretation because of thinking that data is being more spread out towards the edges (as block density is the same on all rings, I think?), but the linear velocity is actually higher at the edges and some googling told me it should more than compensate for that.
Sheepherder
Terracotta Army
Posts: 5192


Reply #41 on: February 12, 2010, 07:57:33 AM

Constant Angular Velocity

Quote
Standard hard disks and floppy disks spin the disk at a constant speed. Regardless of where the heads are, the same speed is used to turn the media. This is called constant angular velocity (CAV) because it takes the same amount of time for a turn of the 360 degrees of the disk at all times. Since the tracks on the inside of the disk are much smaller than those on the outside of the disk, this constant speed means that when the heads are on the outside of the disk they will traverse a much longer linear path than they do when on the inside. Hence, the linear velocity is not constant.

The outer rings have less density because they're apparently more prone to errors, but faster speed, because of CAV.  The actual fastest sector is inwards of the outer edge of the disk.
« Last Edit: February 12, 2010, 07:59:18 AM by Sheepherder »
Engels
Terracotta Army
Posts: 9029

inflicts shingles.


Reply #42 on: February 12, 2010, 08:36:45 AM

I wonder if that explains the way that Windows 7 places the pagefile...just a bit in from the outer rim, and places the restore files as close to the axel as possible, since they aren't used routinely.

I should get back to nature, too.  You know, like going to a shop for groceries instead of the computer.  Maybe a condo in the woods that doesn't even have a health club or restaurant attached.  Buy a car with only two cup holders or something. -Signe

I LIKE being bounced around by Tonkors. - Lantyssa

Babies shooting themselves in the head is the state bird of West Virginia. - schild
Yegolev
Moderator
Posts: 24440

2/10 WOULD NOT INGEST


WWW
Reply #43 on: February 12, 2010, 06:05:37 PM

but we're going full throttle nerd here.

Exactly.  I am, for some incredibly dumb reason, interested in bringing some Real Knowledge forward about Windows... insofar as I have been pretty ignorant of such things for a long time.  These things we are talking about, I can do these and more in AIX and I really want to bring forth the same sort of ability against my home PC.  I might even go so far as to read things on MSDN or wherever such knowledge lives.

So, about the sorting of files to a particular sector... I need to read more of the thin documentation for MyDefrag but currently I know that it is possible to define zones and select certain files to fill that zone.  My current assumption is that Zone 1 is on the outer edge, so if I define a file selection that encompasses the OS files, those should be moved into Zone 1 and therefore to the outer edge.  Unfortunately I have been doing something <SCENE MISSING> and have not had time to practice my black arts on my own PC.

I'll make a tangent here and mention that a reasonable person/program would load oft-needed data into RAM and page out less-needed stuff.  Ideally I would like to read a texture only once, however in a game like The Sims 3 this is a massive challenge.

Why am I homeless?  Why do all you motherfuckers need homes is the real question.
They called it The Prayer, its answer was law
Mommy come back 'cause the water's all gone
Murgos
Terracotta Army
Posts: 7474


Reply #44 on: February 13, 2010, 08:07:33 AM

I would appreciate it if you would post interesting info that you find here.

I've never wanted to learn much about the specific handling of Windows simply because of the obscure and unmanageable nature of how their circular help docs, unintelligible tech information and just generally dumb ideas about UI make it an all around frustrating experience.

But, if you want to dig in up to the elbow and abstract out the nutty goodness I would be willing to learn and follow.

"You have all recieved youre last warning. I am in the process of currently tracking all of youre ips and pinging your home adressess. you should not have commencemed a war with me" - Aaron Rayburn
Yegolev
Moderator
Posts: 24440

2/10 WOULD NOT INGEST


WWW
Reply #45 on: February 15, 2010, 09:49:19 AM

I spend a percentage of my time at work translating mind-numbing technical details into things that people who are not fluent in a topic can use to perform tasks... so yeah, I'll try to condense what I find.  The problem that recently cropped up is that my client/wife has grown impatient and wants me to pay a lot of money for whatever will fix the problem. Ohhhhh, I see.  I will still practice on my own rig even if hers isn't available.

Why am I homeless?  Why do all you motherfuckers need homes is the real question.
They called it The Prayer, its answer was law
Mommy come back 'cause the water's all gone
Murgos
Terracotta Army
Posts: 7474


Reply #46 on: February 15, 2010, 10:51:48 AM

My experience with things that you buy to improve performance is that they generally don't and often can be counter-productive.

"You have all recieved youre last warning. I am in the process of currently tracking all of youre ips and pinging your home adressess. you should not have commencemed a war with me" - Aaron Rayburn
Yegolev
Moderator
Posts: 24440

2/10 WOULD NOT INGEST


WWW
Reply #47 on: February 15, 2010, 12:29:46 PM

Which is why this thread was born. Oh ho ho ho. Reallllly?

Why am I homeless?  Why do all you motherfuckers need homes is the real question.
They called it The Prayer, its answer was law
Mommy come back 'cause the water's all gone
Pages: 1 [2] Go Up Print 
f13.net  |  f13.net General Forums  |  Gaming  |  Topic: Performance Tuning Windows 7  
Jump to:  

Powered by SMF 1.1.10 | SMF © 2006-2009, Simple Machines LLC