Hard Drive Speedup Tips

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Quick Tips: Other Routes to Faster Performance Rebuild the desktop file now and then Use folders and aliases extensively Buy a faster hard drive

And see these other Heidsite pages for more hard drive information

Tips for Managing Hard Drive Clutter
PowerBook Hard Drive Tips

Tips for Faster Driving

You can employ a variety of tools and techniques to squeeze every drop of speed out of your hard drive. You might even have everything you need -- you can perform some of the tricks described in this section using the setup software that accompanies most hard drives. For an extra measure of performance or to do advanced drive-tuning, turn to any of several utility packages. Some also streamline working with removable-media SyQuest, Bernoulli, and magneto-optical drives.

Optimizing a drive's performance involves some initial setup and some ongoing maintenance. The setup phases help ensure that the drive and Mac are communicating as fast as they can and that you're using the drive's space efficiently. Ongoing maintenance means using a defragmenting utility to keep the drive's files arranged in a way that allows fastest retrieval.

Formatting: basic setup

All hard drives include a basic formatting utility that prepares the drive for use. Part of the preparation process involves installing the SCSI driver software that the Mac uses to communicate with the drive.

Hard drive vendors often boast that their SCSI drivers are faster than the competitions'. Several companies counter with universal driver/formatter packages that work with any hard drive and promise to deliver better performance than the software that came with yours. Well, surprise: for most applications and mainstream drive capacities, there is little significant performance difference between today's drivers.

That's not to say that standalone driver/formatters package such as Casablanca's Drive7, Surf City Software's Lido 7, FWB's Hard Disk Toolkit series, and La Cie's SilverLining don't have something to offer. If you have an older hard drive acquired in the System 6 era, updating its driver could provide a speed kick as well as System 7 compatibility. If you have an AV or Power Mac, installing a driver that supports the SCSI Manager 4.3's asynchronous transfer capabilities can perk up an older drive.

Some driver/formatter packages also let you specify an interleave ratio, which describes the organization of the wedge-shaped sectors that comprise each track. With the fastest interleave ratio -- 1 to 1 -- sectors are numbered and read or written consecutively. All of today's Macs and hard drives support a 1:1 ratio.

By the way, most driver utilities allow you to install a driver without requiring you to reformat the hard disk, but it's much safer to back up first and then reformat the drive with the utility. One driver package -- Surf City's Lido 7 -- deliberately doesn't support this friendly takeover approach because of the risk of data loss.

Performance tuning: reckless driving?

Some driver/formatter packages, particularly FWB's Hard Disk Toolkit, let you tweak the low-level controller settings that govern how the drive transfers data. These and other driver packages normally set these options automatically at formatting time: the utility determines what type of mechanism the drive uses, and then adjusts its controller options to provide the best overall performance, based on tests done by the driver developer.

If a driver package sets low-level options automatically, can you really improve performance by taking matters into your own hands? You won't find out from these products' manuals, which describe the options but provide little advice for using them.

To be fair, the manuals can't provide specific recommendations for every mechanism. More to the point, different applications tax a drive in different ways -- an option that improves the data retrieval in FileMaker Pro might not help saves in Photoshop. Only by testing a drive with your applications and documents can you find the best combination of low-level settings -- and there's a good chance those settings are the defaults anyway.

Performance tuning tips

Still, there are two general rules of thumb. To improve performance with very large files -- opening Photoshop documents, for example -- be sure that prefetching is enabled. This is a data-access technique that involves reading not only the block of data that the Mac explicitly requested, but also one or more subsequent blocks, which are stored, or cached, in the hard drive's memory buffer. If the Mac needs the cached blocks -- and if you're working with a large image file, it probably will -- the hard drive supplies them from its cache. Some drive mechanisms allow you to specify the number of blocks that are prefetched. Increasing this number can improve performance, too.

But extensive prefetching can actually slow down small, random-access data transfers -- the kind that occur when you're retrieving records from a database, for example. To speed these tasks, try increasing the number of cache segments.

Before adjusting any low-level settings, back up your drive and do some tests, timing the tasks you perform most. Then adjust the settings and check your stopwatch again. You may find a genuine improvement -- or you may find that you've spent hours to save a few milliseconds.

In the end, tweaking drive parameters is most worthwhile for people who constantly perform disk-intensive tasks and who own high-capacity (1GB and up) mechanisms, which have a larger number of adjustable parameters. If this describes you, buy Hard Disk Toolkit.

Partitioning: divide and conquer

All hard drive formatting utilities support partitioning -- the ability to divide the hard drive into a number of smaller-capacity volumes, each of which appears on the desktop as a separate drive. (If your older drive's software doesn't support partitioning, this is another good reason to buy a universal formatter.) Most utilities include a control panel or desk accessory that lets you mount and unmount partitions and often perform other tasks such as locking partitions.

One reason to partition a drive is to improve security: most utilities let you encrypt and password-protect partitions as well as lock them to prevent modification. Also, a virus can't infect an unmounted partition.

Good reasons to partition a drive

Partitioning also offers efficiency and performance advantages. When you save a file, the Mac bites off disk space in chunks called allocation blocks. The larger the hard drive, the larger the block size. Block sizes start at 500 bytes and increase by 500 bytes for every 32MB of drive capacity: 1K on an 80MB hard drive, 4K on a 230MB, 16K on a 1GB.

Here's the rub: Even if a file contains only one character, the Mac gives it an entire allocation block. The combination of a large hard drive and small files -- e-mail messages, memos, small databases--is particularly wasteful: storing 500 tiny files on a 1GB drive wastes 8MB. The solution is to create smaller partitions to hold smaller files.

Partitioning also boosts performance by reducing the amount of searching the Mac must do to locate a particular piece of data. It takes less time to find a file on a 20MB partition than it would if the same file was scattered across a 230MB drive -- just as it would take longer to find an article if an encyclopedia was printed as one huge book instead of being partitioned into numerous smaller ones.

There's more. The tracks on the outer edges of a hard drive's platters generally have faster transfer rates than those on the inner edges.

As a result, you can squeeze an extra drop of speed out of a drive by storing your System Folder and other often-used files on a partition that uses the outer tracks.

How can you tell which partition uses the outer tracks? Easy: Partitions are written from the outer edges of the drive platters toward the inner edges, so the first partition you created will be the fastest.

All driver/formatter packages support partitioning, but only Surf City Software's Lido 7, La Cie's SilverLining, and FWB's Hard Disk Toolkit series allow you change an existing partition's size without erasing its contents.

Optimizing: squelch those seeks

Of all the things that take place within a hard drive, one of the most time consuming is the seek--the drive's read/write heads moving from one track to another. Other things being equal, a drive with a shorter seek time will be faster than a drive with a longer one.

If you've been reading your hard drive utility ads, you probably have nightmares about the specter of file fragmentation. It's what happens as you add and remove files to a hard drive over time. As it recycles disk space freed up by deleted files, the Mac may scatter newly saved files across physically discontiguous tracks. Reading such a file requires more seeks and more time -- just as it takes you longer to seek out an article that is scattered throughout a magazine instead of being printed on contiguous pages.

But as hard drives become faster, fragmentation is becoming a bit like ring around the collar -- a problem whose seriousness is exaggerated by those who sell remedies for it. With today's hard drives, fragmentation doesn't impair performance to the extent that it used to. Partitioning can reduce its effects, too, since on a partition, files are fragmented over a physically smaller area.

Good reasons to defragment your drives

Still, if you're sensitive to your Mac's performance, fragmentation can cause a drive to feel sluggish over time. I often notice the problem in Open and Save dialog boxes -- over time, the drive chatters more and more as I move into and out of nested folders.

Doing away with fragmentation has other benefits.

If a drive's directory becomes damanged, a file-recovery utility stands a better chance of being able to rescue a file whose data is contiguous rather than fragmented across the disk.

If you use System 7 virtual memory, the amount of available VM is limited to the amount of contiguous free disk space.

If you're creating QuickTime movies, you'll get smoother movies if you defragment the hard drive to which you'll be recording.

If you're preparing a master hard drive for CD-ROM production, one of the last steps in the production process involves defragmenting the master hard drive so that the CD-ROM's files are contiguous.

Defragmenting tools

One way to defragment a hard drive is to back it up, initialize it, and then restore its contents, beginning with the System Folder and your most-often-used applications and documents. An easier way is to use a defragmenting utility, sometimes called a disk optimizer.

Some universal formatter packages -- La Cie's SilverLining and Surf City's Lido 7 -- include defragmenting features. Disk optimizers are also included with Symantec's Norton Utilities for Macintosh and Central Point's MacTools Deluxe. The optimizers that accompany these utilities offer smart optimizing features that strategically position certain system files for best performance.

Another excellent optimizer is ALSoft's Disk Express II. Disk Express II can defragment a disk in the background while you work, and it keeps track of the files you use most and optimizes so that those files are physically closest to the drive's directory. To speed the Mac's startup, Disk Express II also organizes system extensions so that they're physically stored in the same order in which they load. You can specify that optimization occur at a particular time, or let Disk Express II optimize automatically when the percentage of fragmented files reaches a specified value.

If you opt for the Norton Utilities, note that version 3.0 of the SpeedDisk program has a serious bug that can trash data. Be sure to use version 3.1 or later of SpeedDisk.

Quick Tips: Other Routes to Faster Performance

Here are a few more ways to reduce a hard drive's performance toll.

Rebuild the desktop file now and then

This invisible file stores the information necessary to display the contents of disks and folders. Over time, it can become fragmented and unnecessarily large, saddled with icons for files long since deleted. To rebuild the desktop, hold down the Command and Option keys while restarting the Mac. When the message appears asking if you want to rebuild the desktop, click OK. One catch: you'll lose any comments added to Get Info windows.

Use folders and aliases extensively

The milliseconds that you might gain with a finely tuned and defragmented drive are lost -- with interest -- when you spend minutes searching for lost or buried files. (For more details on aliases, see the aliases page. For details on working with folders, see the folders page.)

Buy a faster hard drive

If you're slogging along with the 80MB or 230MB drive that accompanied your Mac, supplement it with a 500MB or larger drive. You'll be amazed at how much faster it is.

Of course, as you get accustomed to a fast drive, you'll start wishing it was faster still. When that happens, turn to the tools and techniques I've described here to give it a mid-life speed kick.

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