How To Optimize Your Hard Drive For Speed

In this episode, Linus tells you all about "short-stroking" your harddrive. This little trick can get you even more performance out of your drive by splitting it into a "high performance" drive and a "lower performance" drive.

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[HiHACKER]

*Wow this guy looks like Linus for some reason...!*

[ThexDynastxQueen]

Linus is like a PC ver of Bill Nye the Science Guy. Even when I don't get what he's saying, he still puts up pictures and makes weird sounds and movements to keep me entertained :D

[MedalionDS]

Short stroking... sweet spot... hard drive.... RAM.... computer talk is so dirty

[tomduke]

games in the fast partition, movies in the slow one. got it.

[SpectacularName]

I short stroked my storage but now it won't get hard!

[SikkTwizted]

It almost sounds like he's saying that people who use mechanical hard drives are in the minority. I think it wouldn't be far off to say that 75% of computer users still use them. Might even be accurate at a higher number.

[hal]

"you could've just bought an ssd for that amount."
his delivery made me burst out laughing. lol

[veid]

I usually cover my HDD in cheetah blood to make it go at vroom! vroom! speeds.

[korosibotond]

6 years later, Linus just helped me not rage at my HardDrive

[BoliMeKurac]

Buy a small SSD for the OS, put games on the fast partition of the disc, and movies & music on the slow one :)

[slackjawstudio]

Just named my partition for my mechanical drive skippy, and now it magically runs faster! Thanks bro!

[HBMHD]

Anyone else tired of Google saying "Did you mean "linux"?" Lolol.

[bigun]

Fantastic idea... I may implement this. I have a small SSD for OS, and a platter for game storage. I may do this and put the games I play frequently on the faster partition.

[TheFailOrNot]

I think I did this unintentionally when I set up my PC last time. 2TB HDD with a 120GB C partition for boot and the rest as D for storage. After I installed windows again I was surprised how quickly the rig started up when before it would take around 20-30 seconds it now takes maybe 5-8 from cold boot. Amazing how much you can squeeze out of the mechanical construction :D

[ThatWhiteGuy]

until you can sell me 10 terabytes worth of SSD for under $200 I am keeping my mechanical drives

[Vexhrd]

Linus in 2014: "For all of you still running mechanical Hard Drives"

Me in 2022 without a single SSD:


credit to: @Ethan

[monoolho_mestre]

I find it very funny how europeans, americans and canadians talk about "budgets" and how "expensive" an ssd is... costing  US$ 90.  Here in bbrazil, electronics are so overpriced that simple 250gb ssds range from anything from BRL 500 to BRL 1500. Tell that for a budget-friendly pc.

Brilliant trick, NCIX, I will surely do it with my future HD.

[BlackieNuff]

In my experience (as limited as that may be), the best way to improve performance on a "platter" HDD, is to just keep it defragmented. Defragging not only the data files, but even the free space (Find a program that will do that - I use Defraggler in cooperation with Windows Disk Defragmenter to get the best results - running each separately, of course, duh).

Optimizing, too. I never optimized my HDDs cos I thought optimizing was the same thing as defragging, but recently learned that optimizing just officially clears the data that was deleted from that section of drive, rather than just leaving the data there to be cleared only when new data is being (over)written to that spot. Or something like that...

Still, regular defrags (and possibly also optimizations) would probably go a long way to faster disk performance of HDDs, without all that partitioning nonsense. Especially if you're just gonna stress the drive by running games and programs on a partition that is not the OS partition. Seems counter-intuitive and counter-productive to me? Just run the 1 partition. Why complicate things.

And as for spending the same amount on a "50GB" HDD as you would for a SSD, does the SSD offer anywhere close to the same storage capacity for the money? I doubt it, lol.

I don't trust SSDs. I'd rather sacrifice speed for the chance to recover data in the event of corruption. I mean really, how fast does shit really NEED to go, anyway? You'll save a few seconds here and there? Big whoop...

HDDs will allow rescue and recovery better than SSDs since only the affected sectors are concerned with HDD, whereas with SSDs, the whole drive (or at least the affected chip the sector is sitting on) is fucked if even just one small sector is damaged. Or so I have been led to believe.

[ManWithBeard]

I have 2 short-stroked SSHD's in RAID0. Good job on the explanation, Linus. More people should do this.

[TheDude]

I still run an HDD, I've run HDDs for the last decades and I will probably run HDDs when this channel doesnt even exist any more. Life got so fast over these said decades ... I really have no need to increase its speed even further.