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
BenAddict19 Everything would still work but it would be just as slow as if you didn't do the partitioning, which would mean you wasted the time doing the partitioning.
hello, what if we can't see the cache size even software ?? i have 2 hdd one with buffer cache and the other 1to without cache ? does hard disk without cache exist ? but when i run hdd speed test with program like Crystal disque mark, the second hdd without cache was way faster (3-4 times) what does that mean ? and which hdd is better for my OS ?
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.
SikkTwizted i know what you mean, but i also do think that he was making a joke, as he probably hasn't seen an hdd unless he makes a video about a topic that involves hdds.
SikkTwizted I'm pretty sure the number is higher than that. Even people who can afford SSDs to use them for main storage usually invest in a cheap HDD just for extra mass storage and backup purposes.
SikkTwizted yup & unless someone has plenty of money to burn then a modest SSD for Booting & the main progs + a 1 or 2TB Mechanical drive still makes alot of sense to most of us
SikkTwizted I think you might be surprised how many computers are shipping with SSD's these days, sure we still use HDD's for data storage, the SSD's are for the OS and programs. but SSD's are really going mainstream these days the prices are finally getting good enough to justify using them in builds.
+DanielRichards644 the majority of work stations though still uses mechanical HDD, since price wise it is still a significant increase in cost... and of course... SSD durability still doesn't quite hold up to mechanical HDD... especially after the report a few months back on how SSD mean time before data corruption sign appear, drops drastically once temperature increases to just a few degree above room temperature... to as short as few weeks or months on worst case scenario... this... is obviously unacceptable in a work environment, so unless the temperature can be regulated carefully... and heaven forbid if work stations even bother with that... then it's going to be a long time still before SSD becomes more common in most PC.
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.
HaL, same here. SSDs are coming down in price, so what's the point of Short-Stroking anyway? I'd much rather have SSD speeds for the same price and not waste time or space with ancient storage tech just to squeeze a lil value out of it. Talk about beating a dead horse. Lol
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
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.
Marko Mravak I have a DAMN good system, but haven't always had a good system, in fact, I still have the PC I got into PC gaming with. It had an older phenom chip from AMD and an HD 5870 :P
Frosty Breath Been there, Phenom 9000, HD 4850, 4GB crucial and 500GB Seagate... Than started upgrading to Z87 MPower, 4690K, 120GB Fury ssd, 1TB WD black, 16GB od Kingston Beast :) and finally after a year of waiting an MSI 970 Gaming :D Took me some time but got the best I could buy at the time. Oh and shoved it all in a R4 Define
Marko Mravak I have my other system in a define S, I built in a define R4 once for a client, it's a DREAM to build in, and it's SOO satisfying to get your system up and running in one, because it's so silent :P Do you have any idea about any good mini-ITX cases? I need to build one for my sister, she's going with a more workstation kinda build, a xeon e5 2697 v2, a quadro k6000 and 64GB of ECC RAM, I wanted to make sure her case had adequate airflow, considering it is going to be m-ITX, but I don't know of many that could fit my traditional 3 120mm SP fans.
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.
KiwiPowerNZ That's on a very low-nasdaq day, yes. If you buy it on ebay, if you buy it here in brazil, there are a lot of other costs that will only up the final cost. Nvidia GTX 970 here costs BRL 1899.90 on a low-cost seller. Imagine having to spend this much money on each single high-tier hardware: a hig-end motherboard goes around another BRL1k, for a meager 800 you get a good 2tb wd hd, then you need a processor, psu... Not a cheap hobby/life here.
KiwiPowerNZ And money here is not as devalued like those broken 3rd-world countries where a loaf of bread costs 2000 local monetary unit. Here common everyday stuff costs as much as or at most double their value in 'MURIKA, electronics here are abusively-rapey-expensive.
Please correct me if I am wrong: Partitioning a 1Tera hhd will, separate Os in one partition, data on others so I can change the os without affecting the data. Partitions make it easier to defragment because you can defragment different partitions separately and they are smaller so they will defragment faster. Keeping different types of data on different partitions keeps the reading arm on that section of the drive while using that software that accesses that type of data. For example keeping video files for editing on one partition, and storing finished movie files for viewing on another, and word prossesing documents on another, and so on and so forth.
There are great software titles available that optimizes hard drives and moves data to the outer edge of the drive and you can really see a speed difference. One of the best software titles I found to do this as well as other optimizations is " Auslogics BoostSpeed".
I can't believe this is the first I'm hearing of this tweak. I've always seen a bunch of discussions about RAID, though in all my web travels I've never seen much talk of short stroking. Of course I've since switched to SSD's and shutter at the thought of ever going back to a painfully slow and noisy mechanical drive, even short stoking them, I'll only use a mechanical for storage or desperation.
Looking at the graph i dont really see a drop off point... there is a slowly increasing fall in the graph, as would be expected. i guess you could set a partition based on what the theoretical minimum read speed should be. That said - ive been looking for a way to speed up my video editing. this will surely help a bit :D feeding the data off the drives has been an issue in terms of speed.
xnamkcor X You probably wouldn't even see a speed increase setting up a ram drive as most programs for video editing will use ALL of the ram you have available automatically. Also you still have to wait to load the file from the hard drive and to return it to the hard drive anyway, so I'd recommend buying a SSD instead.
Returning here with the results: running a i7-4770K with 16GB DDR3 RAM 2133MHz, GTX 780 Ti for CUDA, 2 seperate drives running at 7200rpm one of 750GB for the media files and the 500GB for writing, both SATA2, and win8.1 and pagefile are on an SSD. Using Adobe Premier Pro CS6 i made a short stroke partition on both drives with 110+mb/s reading speeds. I used several programs to check on the CPU and GPU activity and just checked on the drive with task manager. Seems it was less active than before, the reading speeds were more constant than before and the CPU was far more active than before. GPU still seemed to hover around 15-20% Dramatically improved were the writing speeds to the 2nd drive; the video was off the RAM much quicker than usual. Reading speeds during editing was around 35MB/s .... though honestly i cant remember what it was before the short stroking... it seems low. (maybe the numbers in task management are not reliable?) im guessing that the better reading speeds benefit the reponse time of the disk by a lot, which better feeds the data to the CPU? I wonder what others think. It seemed to work when looking at the CPU, but the disk numbers still seem low. also not sure what to expect from the CUDA numbers... I guess a SSD would be a good investment at this point.
xXGamingPandaXx It doesn't matter... Unless you can pre-load everything into ram before you start using the PC, then your still going to have to wait for your primary storage (be it HDD, SSD or NAS) to load the files. To put it bluntly, nobody is going to have enough ram to store everything they are going to work on in a day, especially with raw video where files can be tens or even hundreds of gigabytes, your just not going to fit many of them in ram. Thus your waiting to pull the files for your primary storage into your ram, and since the ram is faster than the primary storage, that's going to be speed limited by the primary storage. Thus faster primary storage will increase speed dramatically while adding more ram will only help repeat access speeds to the same limited snapshot of data. Thats not to say more ram won't speed up a video editing rig, but I'd recommend ensuring for primary storage is fast before I'd spend money on any more than 8gb of ram. 16gb ram is about the ideal Ideal for running a i7 4770 with a single mid range SSD as Primary storage. Any more than that and you'll start to show up the bottlenecks elsewhere big time.
Here I am, I've been putting all of my main system partitions on the very outside of the hard disk without realizing I was short-stroking. My primary concern is startup time, so this really is just a way to have faster starts and faster permanent program execution. I really ought to do some file-swapping and move some of my more frequently-used programs out of the slower storage partition I use them in and only make symlinks to them on the same partition I keep my non-permanent / "Portable" programs on.
OMG, when I compared my SSD to my HHD it was not even close. My EVO 850 completely destroyed my Seagate HHD. I am learning this tech stuff so I'm not as smart as the rest of you, but I was very surprised to learn this. Thank you Linus and crew for the info you put out. You all make it easy and fun to learn!
+MCOD1999 I've been using an old hard drive from 2007 (albeit only a few times a month for like the last 2 years) for junk files, it's still ticking away. It's so old, it still has a molex connector on it lol.
Melvin Duineveld Really? Would not have guessed Seagate to have such a long life. Mine's Western Digital so I'm not surprised, but I once had a Seagate that died 3 days after the store return policy was up. T.T
+Melvin Duineveld (melvin2204) Seagates are just like any other HDD. If you're lucky, it's still alive after 10 years. If you're less lucky, it might die in a matter of weeks.
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.
for those who don't want to format to take advantage of the faster area you can use some 3rd party software you to Defrag by disk zone. one software that comes to mine is Auslogics Disk Defrag. you can make it defrag selective folders into a disk zone, fast normal and slow.
I didnt understand it. So, what am I going to do? I got 86 MB/s for maximum and 1.8 MB/s for minimum and average of 58 MB/s? What is the next thing to do?
just use a 25% rule. He explained what to do next. Wipe your partitions, create a new smaller one, and then one with the rest of the space. better yet, buy an samsung 850, use the software to mirror your drive and you're all set.
***** he was probably watching a video in the background, or working with a bloatwared os. Wipe it clean, or at least defrag, then see what your speeds are. Sounds like you have a 2mb cache on an old 5400rpm drive with little free space left. Probably ide interface. Buy a cheap ssd
Very True. Even a modern 7200 rpm sata3 platter drive (Refurb Wester Digital Black 64M cache! on ebay for ~$60) would be a big improvement if I may assume some things that are unsaid about the measured drive ;) but for the purposes of proving out this video on older hardware especially, I'd like to know all the details.... and see the result after it's cleaned up....
there's a program called smart defrag by IObit which does this for you. It defragments your hard drive but puts your most frequently accessed files on the Outer Edge of the disk
SSD have a limited re-write ability. the HDD are 100% rewrite-able (they still destroyed 1 day after years of everyday use). btw for developers if you hate that mechanical arm in HDD i suggest you to replace it with laser lines (alot lasers the one after the other and no need for that slow arm to be there, and also, if you put more that just 1 line of lasers in the same face of disc (2, 4 or 8 of them sychronised to work together for 1 search or individual for lots of searches for more independency or mixed [4 can search 1 file while the other 4 are searching another file(s)] you will get it at extreme speed but the cost will be high then) i could not say HDD are slow then but i could say the design of the HDD are unefficiency (my example that i gave before on how to make it faster was great and efficiency [but not money efficiency])
+Giannis Mariettos Rewritable optical drives exist, and they aren't exactly speed demons. Or did you have a technology to allow lasers to read magnetic media?
ssds will disappear because of obseletion of size before you wear one out with current technology, provided you're not doing server work our mass video editing with them. current tech and new os attention to proper drive management keeps extending the life of these drives.
So, from the perspective of a program like "gparted" or even Windows disk manager, you can create a partition at the "begining" of the drive, somewhere in the middle, or at the "end" of the drive. How do I know whether the "beginning of the drive" or "the end of the drive" is on the outer part of disk platter? Don't most drives have multiple platters?
Wait... so when I built my rig a few years ago and set up my partitions the way I did, my reasoning was actually valid without direct proof? I set myself up two hard drives and partitioned each up, putting what I figured I would be more active on the first partitions of each drive and less active files in the latter partitions of each drive. Of course, looking at it now, I think I need to shuffle some of the contents around.
Great, thanks!! I use a WD Black 1TB. I Went from Max: 180 - Min: 61, to Max: 180 - Min: 140Mb/s. I deleted 500Gb. Another pro tip from me is that if you already have installed something on the disk and don't wanna format and create two new empty partitions, you can just shrink the disk of the value you want to (In my case 500Gb) and just expand it to ordinary (in my case 1000Gb) when the 500Gb gets full. :)
Is there a way to combine short stroking and raid? So say I took two drives and made two half capacity partitions on both drives, and then set the backup portions to be the two slower partitions? I would think the drive wouldn't be flipping it's arm back and forth between the partitions then, as the slower partitions would only be accessed during backups. This would negate the losses Linus talk about.
Ok, so I've followed everything in the video. How do I know when I create the partition on Disk Manager that the new partition is being made on the outer rings of the disk and not the inner ones?
Yes. It makes it laggy and have a lot of spikes and package loss from transparent information that gets displayed like fire, visuals, shadows, etc... because the connection is slow.
no it only slows down your loading times of the games, there is no other impact, except if it starts writting / reading something on the background while youre playing, it will break down performance. i say this not only by research, as i have experienced it aswell, i went from a SATA hdd to an IDE hdd and the fps are the same, appart of course from what i stated, when its loading or reading something else on the background
Wouldn't the outer rims spin "slower" than the inner rims simply due to the RPMs in relation to the circumference? The outer rims have "longer distance" to travel than the inner rims, right? If you were the laser lens, and had to "walk" a complete circle around the center, would it not be done faster than making a complete circle around the outer edge? Maybe I am missing something, a key factor that would in fact make the inner rims slower (like the fact actual data is being read/written to a surface whizzing by much faster than can be completed in a single pass)? Help me out here. :-P
The RPMs are fixed, regardless of the location of the track (or rim). Therefore, the time it takes to "walk" a complete circle around the center will always be the same, regardless of how close you are to the center.
I'm having a weird issue. I'm moving a folder to another partition of the SAME drive, and it started at like 10mbps, and then is now progressively going down from 9 to 7 to now 4.1 ... what gives ?
I know this is a old article but would it not be best to take the "drop off point" of the read & write bench, and then average those out to get better performance as the read on a disk will always be far superior to the write. I played around with the short stroking on a old 160GB 5400RMP 2.5" HDD and going between a 32 / 64 / 70 / 80 / 90 / 100Gb partition made no diff to the speeds HDtune gave me, but I was testing this as a external drive with no data on it..
Fast partition: For games, OS and applications, Slow partition: For pictures, videoes and documents! That works good I guess since then you usually access only one at a time for the most part
Hey there, NCIX is my fav site for parts! So if i just recently wiped all partitions from a hdd and started over and made a 100 gb partition in which to boot a brand new install of windows 10, will windows automatically put that 100 gb partition on the fastest part of the drive?
Hi, If I have SSD where my OS is installed, do I must install all games and programs on SSD itself to get maximum performance? especially games are having huge data these days ?
Best compromise in my opinion is to buy a fast but low or medium capacity SSD for the OS and your apps while using a slower but high-capacity HD for your data. I have a 120GB SSD for my OS and apps while my data mainly resides in my 1TB HD, augmented by an external 500GB USB3 HD.
This is useful for those without SSDs and want their boot drive to respond in a pseudo ssd manner. To keep access time on drive short you cannot use remainder of drive and use separate drive as storage.
FYI to all viewers, there are videos showing that once a game has loaded up, nothing speeds it up. They compared m.2, ssd, hybrid hdd, and hdd. Using video games, each game loaded the fastest starting at m.2 going down, but once the game was running, there were no fps improvements across any drive with all other components being equal.
well, you surely could go through the hassle of setting up multiple partitions on your drive according to the illusive drop off point of the read/write speeds... OR you could just use the Disk Defragmenter under Windows every once in a while.
hey, i was configuring a laptop on pcspecialist and i was wondering whether my additional choices were worth the cost? first: the step from i5 to i7, secondly, i chose the gtx 940m over the intel hd 530. i also chose 16gb of ram over 8, and i got that £10 extra cooling thing. what is the waste of money and what was actually a decent move, thanks! also is it worth the extra money for SSD for gaming? i only really play World of Tanks xD
TBH we are lacking critical information. what is this to be used for? If Gaming, then no, don't bother with the i7. To go bigger on ram, and make the jump to the i7 you could really only justify the cost for a video editing machine.
or if you got a sweet deal like $99 for an intel i7 4970k Currently on air, but watercooled it will OC to 4.8 Ghz without full load thermal throttling :D..... That's how I ended up with an i7 in my latest custom build.
watch some linus videos on "should I buy a video card, or a better cpu" and you'll see you can game on some pretty ancient processor platforms with a good video card.
did I miss something or did he not specify which half of the partition is the short-stroked one? Not all discs read/write the same, so it doesn't mean that the beginning of a hard drive is closer to the center of the disc.
Okay, so the hard drive always starts at the outermost edge and fills inward? I was not sure about that. Now that I know this, I will make the swap space first. I have four drives, two are 250GB and two are 1TB. I have never done RAID before, but I wonder if it's possible to RAID the shortstroke partitions to make them faster while still using the rest of the drives as non-RAID long term storage. I would boot from the smaller drives and use the short stroke RAID as swap space and the long term storage would be for backups, so I would temporarily switch my swap space to one of the smaller drives while running a backup, but otherwise the TB drives would only be used for 8GB of swap space.
So if I get this straight... All I need to do is to format a disk, and when I partition it to 225GB, it will automatically choose the fastest part of the disk?
Defrag. Problem solved... Seriously, why shortstroke? A defrag program will put the files that benefit from fast access on the outer edge. That won't change very often. A good defrag problem will analyze usage data and move the most-used files to the fastest spots (which is how Hybrid drives work with the SSD + HDD).
actually it doesn't have to be necessarily a budget issue but rather a matter of personal preference and some cases of random data loss on a samsung ssd(brand new and repeatedly happening)
A problem I got doing this is that the drive needs to go to the center and back out all the time, response time became a huge problem and eventually my PC crawled slower than ever
the outer edge is going to move faster to the reader faster then the center? Wait wed be limiting a lot of the drive just to make it read faster. could be wrong im just asking.
*Wow this guy looks like Linus for some reason...!*
HiHACKER jokes on you..it is linus
he is -_-
TheHawkGamer r/wooosh
@TheHawkGamer Sugma Dick
nonono you ligma balls
Short stroking... sweet spot... hard drive.... RAM.... computer talk is so dirty
lmao
Made my day
lol
little bit more juice...
True! 😁
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
Oh my gosh so true.
Linus is my favorite tech guy....... I seem to learn more from him, than from other tech guys....
+The Dynast Queen Even worse. He's a CANADIAN PC Bill Nye
Nah Canucks are alright
so much talking..
games in the fast partition, movies in the slow one. got it.
tom duke just don't watch a movie while playing the game.
+DanielRichards644 what would happen if he did?
BenAddict19
Everything would still work but it would be just as slow as if you didn't do the partitioning, which would mean you wasted the time doing the partitioning.
+DanielRichards644 oh right! i would do this but i only use my hard drive for file storage so it won't really leave the 250gb zone, for a while.
hello, what if we can't see the cache size even software ?? i have 2 hdd one with buffer cache and the other 1to without cache ? does hard disk without cache exist ? but when i run hdd speed test with program like Crystal disque mark, the second hdd without cache was way faster (3-4 times) what does that mean ? and which hdd is better for my OS ?
I short stroked my storage but now it won't get hard!
Was it an SSD or a "hard" drive? Get it? No? .....
Looks like you have a floppy
because it megahertz :P
Jacob Vasquez That joke is incredibly DIMMwitted.
Why shorten the strokes when the drive is already hard?! That's just plain rude!
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.
SikkTwizted i know what you mean, but i also do think that he was making a joke, as he probably hasn't seen an hdd unless he makes a video about a topic that involves hdds.
SikkTwizted I'm pretty sure the number is higher than that. Even people who can afford SSDs to use them for main storage usually invest in a cheap HDD just for extra mass storage and backup purposes.
SikkTwizted yup & unless someone has plenty of money to burn then a modest SSD for Booting & the main progs + a 1 or 2TB Mechanical drive still makes alot of sense to most of us
SikkTwizted I think you might be surprised how many computers are shipping with SSD's these days, sure we still use HDD's for data storage, the SSD's are for the OS and programs. but SSD's are really going mainstream these days the prices are finally getting good enough to justify using them in builds.
+DanielRichards644 the majority of work stations though still uses mechanical HDD, since price wise it is still a significant increase in cost...
and of course... SSD durability still doesn't quite hold up to mechanical HDD... especially after the report a few months back on how SSD mean time before data corruption sign appear, drops drastically once temperature increases to just a few degree above room temperature... to as short as few weeks or months on worst case scenario...
this... is obviously unacceptable in a work environment, so unless the temperature can be regulated carefully... and heaven forbid if work stations even bother with that... then it's going to be a long time still before SSD becomes more common in most PC.
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.
I usually cover my HDD in cheetah blood to make it go at vroom! vroom! speeds.
What about painting racing stripes on it, they made mine 2x as fast!
+Tristan Barton buy black hdds to make it run faster
I cover mine with tears from my low budget
+Reality Check 😂 😂 😂 😂 😂 😂 😂 😂
Seagate uses baracuda bits...
Just named my partition for my mechanical drive skippy, and now it magically runs faster! Thanks bro!
I laughed too hard
"you could've just bought an ssd for that amount."
his delivery made me burst out laughing. lol
HaL, same here. SSDs are coming down in price, so what's the point of Short-Stroking anyway? I'd much rather have SSD speeds for the same price and not waste time or space with ancient storage tech just to squeeze a lil value out of it. Talk about beating a dead horse. Lol
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
I have 2 short-stroked SSHD's in RAID0. Good job on the explanation, Linus. More people should do this.
6 years later, Linus just helped me not rage at my HardDrive
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.
Buy a small SSD for the OS, put games on the fast partition of the disc, and movies & music on the slow one :)
Marko Mravak Or be like me and have 2 750 series SSD's by intel (PCI-e add-in) :D
weeeel we can't all be like you :P
Marko Mravak I have a DAMN good system, but haven't always had a good system, in fact, I still have the PC I got into PC gaming with. It had an older phenom chip from AMD and an HD 5870 :P
Frosty Breath Been there, Phenom 9000, HD 4850, 4GB crucial and 500GB Seagate... Than started upgrading to Z87 MPower, 4690K, 120GB Fury ssd, 1TB WD black, 16GB od Kingston Beast :) and finally after a year of waiting an MSI 970 Gaming :D Took me some time but got the best I could buy at the time. Oh and shoved it all in a R4 Define
Marko Mravak I have my other system in a define S, I built in a define R4 once for a client, it's a DREAM to build in, and it's SOO satisfying to get your system up and running in one, because it's so silent :P Do you have any idea about any good mini-ITX cases? I need to build one for my sister, she's going with a more workstation kinda build, a xeon e5 2697 v2, a quadro k6000 and 64GB of ECC RAM, I wanted to make sure her case had adequate airflow, considering it is going to be m-ITX, but I don't know of many that could fit my traditional 3 120mm SP fans.
"Still running" damm.. 8 years ago he thought they were old tech
until you can sell me 10 terabytes worth of SSD for under $200 I am keeping my mechanical drives
@0 32, wow, you sure showed him, you fucking imbecile.
You can get 2 4tb Drives for $200
These comments don't age well.
@@bradenmurphy5797 honestly I don't understand them. I can't find a 1tb ssd for under $100.
@@JohnSmith-hy8jj Same, though I saw a 512GB SSD on sale for $50 once, but that was really rare.
Linus in 2014: "For all of you still running mechanical Hard Drives"
Me in 2022 without a single SSD:
credit to: @Ethan
I find it very funny how europeans, americans and canadians talk about "budgets" and how "expensive" an ssd is... costing US$ 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.
monoolho com m That's 162-486 US Dollars.
KiwiPowerNZ That's on a very low-nasdaq day, yes. If you buy it on ebay, if you buy it here in brazil, there are a lot of other costs that will only up the final cost. Nvidia GTX 970 here costs BRL 1899.90 on a low-cost seller. Imagine having to spend this much money on each single high-tier hardware: a hig-end motherboard goes around another BRL1k, for a meager 800 you get a good 2tb wd hd, then you need a processor, psu... Not a cheap hobby/life here.
KiwiPowerNZ And money here is not as devalued like those broken 3rd-world countries where a loaf of bread costs 2000 local monetary unit. Here common everyday stuff costs as much as or at most double their value in 'MURIKA, electronics here are abusively-rapey-expensive.
monoolho com m I don't live in the USA I live in New Zealand. You said a GTX970 costs 1899.90 which is $829 NZD, about the price of a GTX980 here!
monoolho com m ya tenho colegas zucas ke compram bue cenas de informatica aki em portugal e vao vender pó brazil xD
Please correct me if I am wrong: Partitioning a 1Tera hhd will, separate Os in one partition, data on others so I can change the os without affecting the data.
Partitions make it easier to defragment because you can defragment different partitions separately and they are smaller so they will defragment faster.
Keeping different types of data on different partitions keeps the reading arm on that section of the drive while using that software that accesses that type of data. For example keeping video files for editing on one partition, and storing finished movie files for viewing on another, and word prossesing documents on another, and so on and so forth.
no defrag collects free bits, or if I'm reading your post wrong.... then no it does not correct all the binary 0s to one area.
OMG the subtitles are perfect !
They are, Google have improved on their auto subtitle feature.
Purp
There are great software titles available that optimizes hard drives and moves data to the outer edge of the drive and you can really see a speed difference. One of the best software titles I found to do this as well as other optimizations is " Auslogics BoostSpeed".
Anyone else tired of Google saying "Did you mean "linux"?" Lolol.
HBMHD I got a hit for that Kid with a Security Blanket from the Peanuts/Charlie Brown cartoons, heh
I seriously love you Linus, always out here spitting straight facts.
I think every guy uses short strokes lol
I see what you did there
Some guys need to uses long strokes, but we don't talk about those guys.
You are awesome bro. I love the personality, knowledge and environment you put in this video.
Hah... Overclocking a harddrive....?
Not overclocking, just optimizing the data distribution.
I know. It's called humor
Well, you never know, remember the overclockable ssd anyone?
Overclock my hardrive? I just use cheetah blood on the head.
yes this humor went over my clocks until it hit rock bottom.
I can't believe this is the first I'm hearing of this tweak. I've always seen a bunch of discussions about RAID, though in all my web travels I've never seen much talk of short stroking. Of course I've since switched to SSD's and shutter at the thought of ever going back to a painfully slow and noisy mechanical drive, even short stoking them, I'll only use a mechanical for storage or desperation.
Looking at the graph i dont really see a drop off point... there is a slowly increasing fall in the graph, as would be expected.
i guess you could set a partition based on what the theoretical minimum read speed should be.
That said - ive been looking for a way to speed up my video editing. this will surely help a bit :D feeding the data off the drives has been an issue in terms of speed.
I did this as well. Amazing speed up.
But now i have an ssd...
AWESOME :D
xnamkcor X
You probably wouldn't even see a speed increase setting up a ram drive as most programs for video editing will use ALL of the ram you have available automatically. Also you still have to wait to load the file from the hard drive and to return it to the hard drive anyway, so I'd recommend buying a SSD instead.
Returning here with the results:
running a i7-4770K with 16GB DDR3 RAM 2133MHz, GTX 780 Ti for CUDA, 2 seperate drives running at 7200rpm one of 750GB for the media files and the 500GB for writing, both SATA2, and win8.1 and pagefile are on an SSD. Using Adobe Premier Pro CS6
i made a short stroke partition on both drives with 110+mb/s reading speeds.
I used several programs to check on the CPU and GPU activity and just checked on the drive with task manager. Seems it was less active than before, the reading speeds were more constant than before and the CPU was far more active than before. GPU still seemed to hover around 15-20%
Dramatically improved were the writing speeds to the 2nd drive; the video was off the RAM much quicker than usual.
Reading speeds during editing was around 35MB/s .... though honestly i cant remember what it was before the short stroking... it seems low. (maybe the numbers in task management are not reliable?)
im guessing that the better reading speeds benefit the reponse time of the disk by a lot, which better feeds the data to the CPU?
I wonder what others think. It seemed to work when looking at the CPU, but the disk numbers still seem low. also not sure what to expect from the CUDA numbers...
I guess a SSD would be a good investment at this point.
Hamish McGregor You realize that ram is faster then ssd in most forms of video editing programs.
xXGamingPandaXx
It doesn't matter... Unless you can pre-load everything into ram before you start using the PC, then your still going to have to wait for your primary storage (be it HDD, SSD or NAS) to load the files.
To put it bluntly, nobody is going to have enough ram to store everything they are going to work on in a day, especially with raw video where files can be tens or even hundreds of gigabytes, your just not going to fit many of them in ram. Thus your waiting to pull the files for your primary storage into your ram, and since the ram is faster than the primary storage, that's going to be speed limited by the primary storage. Thus faster primary storage will increase speed dramatically while adding more ram will only help repeat access speeds to the same limited snapshot of data.
Thats not to say more ram won't speed up a video editing rig, but I'd recommend ensuring for primary storage is fast before I'd spend money on any more than 8gb of ram. 16gb ram is about the ideal Ideal for running a i7 4770 with a single mid range SSD as Primary storage. Any more than that and you'll start to show up the bottlenecks elsewhere big time.
I actually used everything you mentioned and I've done it on many computers. Thank you
I learned something new thanks mate
Here I am, I've been putting all of my main system partitions on the very outside of the hard disk without realizing I was short-stroking.
My primary concern is startup time, so this really is just a way to have faster starts and faster permanent program execution. I really ought to do some file-swapping and move some of my more frequently-used programs out of the slower storage partition I use them in and only make symlinks to them on the same partition I keep my non-permanent / "Portable" programs on.
No, no! It's all wrong!!!
You must squeeze it like Michael from Vsauce!
OMG, when I compared my SSD to my HHD it was not even close. My EVO 850 completely destroyed my Seagate HHD. I am learning this tech stuff so I'm not as smart as the rest of you, but I was very surprised to learn this. Thank you Linus and crew for the info you put out. You all make it easy and fun to learn!
I short stroked my hard drive last night, if you know what I mean.
As a person who just got a 1tb 850 evo. I am kinda amazed at the performance.
How long on average does a HDD last before it dies or becomes unusable or a pain to use?
+MCOD1999 I think it's random, but some disks are fine even after some years...
+MCOD1999 I've been using an old hard drive from 2007 (albeit only a few times a month for like the last 2 years) for junk files, it's still ticking away. It's so old, it still has a molex connector on it lol.
Melvin Duineveld Really? Would not have guessed Seagate to have such a long life. Mine's Western Digital so I'm not surprised, but I once had a Seagate that died 3 days after the store return policy was up. T.T
+Melvin Duineveld (melvin2204) Seagates are just like any other HDD. If you're lucky, it's still alive after 10 years. If you're less lucky, it might die in a matter of weeks.
I have a couple 20 year old ones around. Can't use them any more because they don't use SATA.
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.
U STILL ?
Correction: Not everyone has the budget to run 8 *REFURBISHED* SSDs in RAID0. :)
magister213 драмнбасс сосатт
for those who don't want to format to take advantage of the faster area you can use some 3rd party software you to Defrag by disk zone. one software that comes to mine is Auslogics Disk Defrag. you can make it defrag selective folders into a disk zone, fast normal and slow.
I didnt understand it. So, what am I going to do? I got 86 MB/s for maximum and 1.8 MB/s for minimum and average of 58 MB/s? What is the next thing to do?
just use a 25% rule. He explained what to do next. Wipe your partitions, create a new smaller one, and then one with the rest of the space. better yet, buy an samsung 850, use the software to mirror your drive and you're all set.
Buy a new drive. That thing is even from 1999 or close to its death.
***** he was probably watching a video in the background, or working with a bloatwared os. Wipe it clean, or at least defrag, then see what your speeds are. Sounds like you have a 2mb cache on an old 5400rpm drive with little free space left. Probably ide interface. Buy a cheap ssd
Chris Lesmerises No matter whats the reason, he defenetly should get a new one xD
Very True. Even a modern 7200 rpm sata3 platter drive (Refurb Wester Digital Black 64M cache! on ebay for ~$60) would be a big improvement if I may assume some things that are unsaid about the measured drive ;) but for the purposes of proving out this video on older hardware especially, I'd like to know all the details.... and see the result after it's cleaned up....
there's a program called smart defrag by IObit which does this for you. It defragments your hard drive but puts your most frequently accessed files on the Outer Edge of the disk
SSD have a limited re-write ability.
the HDD are 100% rewrite-able (they still destroyed 1 day after years of everyday use).
btw for developers if you hate that mechanical arm in HDD i suggest you to replace it with laser lines (alot lasers the one after the other and no need for that slow arm to be there, and also, if you put more that just 1 line of lasers in the same face of disc (2, 4 or 8 of them sychronised to work together for 1 search or individual for lots of searches for more independency or mixed [4 can search 1 file while the other 4 are searching another file(s)] you will get it at extreme speed but the cost will be high then)
i could not say HDD are slow then but i could say the design of the HDD are unefficiency (my example that i gave before on how to make it faster was great and efficiency [but not money efficiency])
+Giannis Mariettos Rewritable optical drives exist, and they aren't exactly speed demons. Or did you have a technology to allow lasers to read magnetic media?
stellarfirefly i were meanning magnetic heads, i just forgotted that HDD have magnetic heads not lasers.
ssds will disappear because of obseletion of size before you wear one out with current technology, provided you're not doing server work our mass video editing with them. current tech and new os attention to proper drive management keeps extending the life of these drives.
stellarfirefly there are lasers that can read and write magnetic media, you can google it
Giannis Mariettos Given that light is a function of the certain wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum that's not too hard to believe!
Funny seeing this guy without a beard again
Mechanical HDD master race.
Just saved myself $99, thanks Linus. I've been wanting a faster drive but this I will be content with.
Dude your voice sounded unusually high pitched in this video ='D
So, from the perspective of a program like "gparted" or even Windows disk manager, you can create a partition at the "begining" of the drive, somewhere in the middle, or at the "end" of the drive. How do I know whether the "beginning of the drive" or "the end of the drive" is on the outer part of disk platter? Don't most drives have multiple platters?
i still have toshiba 80gb hdd,10 years old...
0kb in bad sectors
Wait... so when I built my rig a few years ago and set up my partitions the way I did, my reasoning was actually valid without direct proof? I set myself up two hard drives and partitioned each up, putting what I figured I would be more active on the first partitions of each drive and less active files in the latter partitions of each drive.
Of course, looking at it now, I think I need to shuffle some of the contents around.
Linus, you gotta work on your "jokes" if you don't wanna sound like a 5-year-old.
Nah,it's alright considering he's a dad.
You know..dad jokes...
He's not the one who makes them up. It's not his fault
keep it up linus u r improving now on ur jokes
Keys writes the scripts.
aeroaa2 dont fucking overreact, linus is still linus, nobody likes the exaggerating whiners.
Great, thanks!! I use a WD Black 1TB. I Went from Max: 180 - Min: 61, to Max: 180 - Min: 140Mb/s. I deleted 500Gb.
Another pro tip from me is that if you already have installed something on the disk and don't wanna format and create two new empty partitions, you can just shrink the disk of the value you want to (In my case 500Gb) and just expand it to ordinary (in my case 1000Gb) when the 500Gb gets full. :)
4tb ssd is 1200 dollars lol
He was talking about an SSHD which is basically an HDD with SSD cache. They arent that much more expensive than usual HDDs but give you a nice boost.
***** Oh okay lol yeah I know what a sshd is I just thought he was talking about a ssd.
4 years ago ,)
Is there a way to combine short stroking and raid? So say I took two drives and made two half capacity partitions on both drives, and then set the backup portions to be the two slower partitions? I would think the drive wouldn't be flipping it's arm back and forth between the partitions then, as the slower partitions would only be accessed during backups. This would negate the losses Linus talk about.
Ok, so I've followed everything in the video. How do I know when I create the partition on Disk Manager that the new partition is being made on the outer rings of the disk and not the inner ones?
4 years later and its still work.
An old HDD Can lower FPS?
Yes. It makes it laggy and have a lot of spikes and package loss from transparent information that gets displayed like fire, visuals, shadows, etc... because the connection is slow.
no it only slows down your loading times of the games, there is no other impact, except if it starts writting / reading something on the background while youre playing, it will break down performance.
i say this not only by research, as i have experienced it aswell, i went from a SATA hdd to an IDE hdd and the fps are the same, appart of course from what i stated, when its loading or reading something else on the background
No , but lets say that in gta5 the map will load slower , so sometimes the game will be laggy
Wouldn't the outer rims spin "slower" than the inner rims simply due to the RPMs in relation to the circumference? The outer rims have "longer distance" to travel than the inner rims, right? If you were the laser lens, and had to "walk" a complete circle around the center, would it not be done faster than making a complete circle around the outer edge?
Maybe I am missing something, a key factor that would in fact make the inner rims slower (like the fact actual data is being read/written to a surface whizzing by much faster than can be completed in a single pass)? Help me out here. :-P
The RPMs are fixed, regardless of the location of the track (or rim). Therefore, the time it takes to "walk" a complete circle around the center will always be the same, regardless of how close you are to the center.
Does this work with WD Black or just WD Blue?
(Joke ends here)
Ha.
Looks like the NCIX RUclips channel is still up
Linus, you guys need to fix the echo in the room ur recording in...
I'm having a weird issue. I'm moving a folder to another partition of the SAME drive, and it started at like 10mbps, and then is now progressively going down from 9 to 7 to now 4.1 ... what gives ?
lil skippy lol
Wow, this was an awesome topic. Can't wait to try it on my sshd
Thanks Linus.
You talk way too slow..........I fell asleep......
I know this is a old article but would it not be best to take the "drop off point" of the read & write bench, and then average those out to get better performance as the read on a disk will always be far superior to the write.
I played around with the short stroking on a old 160GB 5400RMP 2.5" HDD and going between a 32 / 64 / 70 / 80 / 90 / 100Gb partition made no diff to the speeds HDtune gave me, but I was testing this as a external drive with no data on it..
I didn't understand ... anything
Yadishb Gopaul there are programs designed to find your most frequently used data and move it to the fastest parts so you don't have to do anything :)
Could you name a program that does that which I can download, please?
up
Fast partition: For games, OS and applications, Slow partition: For pictures, videoes and documents! That works good I guess since then you usually access only one at a time for the most part
Them inhales tho
Hey there, NCIX is my fav site for parts! So if i just recently wiped all partitions from a hdd and started over and made a 100 gb partition in which to boot a brand new install of windows 10, will windows automatically put that 100 gb partition on the fastest part of the drive?
Would changing the NTFS cluster sizes to maximum help improve performance by greatly reducing fragmentation?
Hi, If I have SSD where my OS is installed, do I must install all games and programs on SSD itself to get maximum performance? especially games are having huge data these days ?
Best compromise in my opinion is to buy a fast but low or medium capacity SSD for the OS and your apps while using a slower but high-capacity HD for your data. I have a 120GB SSD for my OS and apps while my data mainly resides in my 1TB HD, augmented by an external 500GB USB3 HD.
Will this work if you shrink your current partition and create a new one with the new free space?
That`s a nice tip :) Never heard of shortstroking before..
Wow, this is a great idea when using 10k speed HDD (for longer endurance) for Chia plotting to reduce plot times!
That... is a brilliant idea. So simple, yet effective.
This is useful for those without SSDs and want their boot drive to respond in a pseudo ssd manner. To keep access time on drive short you cannot use remainder of drive and use separate drive as storage.
FYI to all viewers, there are videos showing that once a game has loaded up, nothing speeds it up. They compared m.2, ssd, hybrid hdd, and hdd. Using video games, each game loaded the fastest starting at m.2 going down, but once the game was running, there were no fps improvements across any drive with all other components being equal.
I presume that this all requires backing up and reinstalling the information you have on the drive you are trying to "short stroke". Is that correct?
Would doing this make much of a difference to the performance of a hybrid hard drive?
well, you surely could go through the hassle of setting up multiple partitions on your drive according to the illusive drop off point of the read/write speeds... OR you could just use the Disk Defragmenter under Windows every once in a while.
This guy looks and sounds like Linus tech tips it’s crazy
hey, i was configuring a laptop on pcspecialist and i was wondering whether my additional choices were worth the cost? first: the step from i5 to i7, secondly, i chose the gtx 940m over the intel hd 530. i also chose 16gb of ram over 8, and i got that £10 extra cooling thing. what is the waste of money and what was actually a decent move, thanks!
also is it worth the extra money for SSD for gaming? i only really play World of Tanks xD
ssd is worth it for responsiveness everywhere. i5. gtx940 8gb ram
so the i7 isnt really worth it?
TBH we are lacking critical information. what is this to be used for? If Gaming, then no, don't bother with the i7. To go bigger on ram, and make the jump to the i7 you could really only justify the cost for a video editing machine.
or if you got a sweet deal like $99 for an intel i7 4970k Currently on air, but watercooled it will OC to 4.8 Ghz without full load thermal throttling :D..... That's how I ended up with an i7 in my latest custom build.
watch some linus videos on "should I buy a video card, or a better cpu" and you'll see you can game on some pretty ancient processor platforms with a good video card.
did I miss something or did he not specify which half of the partition is the short-stroked one? Not all discs read/write the same, so it doesn't mean that the beginning of a hard drive is closer to the center of the disc.
your best video yet
And there are some Defrag software which keeps frequently used files very closer to the inner platter of the drive.
Okay, so the hard drive always starts at the outermost edge and fills inward? I was not sure about that. Now that I know this, I will make the swap space first. I have four drives, two are 250GB and two are 1TB. I have never done RAID before, but I wonder if it's possible to RAID the shortstroke partitions to make them faster while still using the rest of the drives as non-RAID long term storage. I would boot from the smaller drives and use the short stroke RAID as swap space and the long term storage would be for backups, so I would temporarily switch my swap space to one of the smaller drives while running a backup, but otherwise the TB drives would only be used for 8GB of swap space.
And how exactly do you do that?
So if I get this straight... All I need to do is to format a disk, and when I partition it to 225GB, it will automatically choose the fastest part of the disk?
although i have an ssd for my operating system and a couple of steam games this video is very helpful for my second hard drive
Defrag. Problem solved...
Seriously, why shortstroke? A defrag program will put the files that benefit from fast access on the outer edge. That won't change very often.
A good defrag problem will analyze usage data and move the most-used files to the fastest spots (which is how Hybrid drives work with the SSD + HDD).
actually it doesn't have to be necessarily a budget issue but rather a matter of personal preference and some cases of random data loss on a samsung ssd(brand new and repeatedly happening)
Not for the audio: there is a echo in the background.
For the rest of the video, nice to lern abouth this kind of optimisation
Good job Skippy!
I am still running HDD in 2020. Who else?
Me here, still have an 5400 rpm from a 5 years old laptop
Why not use a usb stik and use it with readyboost together with the old drive ?
A problem I got doing this is that the drive needs to go to the center and back out all the time,
response time became a huge problem and eventually my PC crawled slower than ever
the outer edge is going to move faster to the reader faster then the center?
Wait wed be limiting a lot of the drive just to make it read faster. could be wrong im just asking.
I like the way he shakes the drive