How do i short stroke my hard drives

[WINTERLORD]

anyone know? i have 2 36gb raptors in a raid 0. and i dont need the space since everything is directed to save elsewhere on a strorage drive so the combined 74gb total is more then enough and i want performance.

how do i short stroke the hard drives is there a utility or somthing i need.

 

[shovenose]

no clue i am just posting this here so it notifies me when someone else replies, as id like to know too! sorry

 

[cjl]

All you need to do is make a partition on the first portion of the drive, and leave the rest unformatted.

 

[shovenose]

how big?

 

[sminlal]

If you want the maximum effectiveness from short stroking, make the partition no larger than it absolutely has to be in order to hold whatever you plan to put into it. For example, if you're going to install the OS and you expect it and other programs you install to take no more than 30GB, then create a 30GB for the OS and leave the rest of the disk unpartitioned.

(You can put additional partitions on the disk, but if you access the data in them a lot you'll be forcing the drive to seek between them - that will hurt performance and basically undo the benefits you gained from short stroking the drive in the first place).

 

[RetiredChief]

minor twist to good info provided above.

When you open "setting up Raid" do not select the full disk, just specify the size you want then select strip size. You can then select the rest of the drive for a 2nd stripped volumn.

Windows will think/show two hard drives so load your operating system on the first volume/drive - leave the 2nd one fres (do not initialize it.

 

[WINTERLORD]

does it have to be when im setting the drive up or will it work just by changing the partion smaller in admin tools under computer management

 

[RetiredChief]

For a short stroke, I always set it up in the raid0 setup prior to loading the operating system.

If your into experimenting, Do it one way and run crystal disk then set it up the otherway and rerun the benchies - pick the best and let us know which is best.

 

[WINTERLORD]

im bettin the matrix raid is prolly the best as opposed to the os but idk yet!!