Posts Tagged ‘disk’

Windows NTFS Performance

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

For a very long time I was perplexed as to why my old 900Mhz Pentium-3 server outperformed many of my newer and faster machines, even when they all were running with essentially the same amount of memory and had the same 7200rpm hard-drives.

I recently realized that over the years, I had optimized the WindowsXP NTFS registry settings with a variety of software and manual edits, and thus had essentially changed the way that windows works with the drive itself.

Here are the current settings that these machines utilize, perhaps you can try them for yourselves:

WARNING: You need to be confortable making edits to your registry to do these changes, as such I will not document ‘how’ to open the registry itself, you can easily find that info anyways.  These are all DWORD settings.

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem

  • DisableNTFSLastAccessUpdate  = 1
  • NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation = 1
  • NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate = 1
  • NtfsMftZoneReservation = 2

Cheers

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Free Windows Defragmentation Software

Monday, March 3rd, 2008

Windows, due to it’s MS-DOS heritage has a lot of problems due to disk fragmentation.  To maintain optimal disk read speed, it is advised to “defrag” on a regular basis.   Whether or not LINUX has similar problems remains a subject of debate.

I’ve used many different defrag utilities over the years,  my current choices are Diskkeeper Lite and Defraggler.

Most of these vendors are free or provide free trials of their software, I’ve noted the versions I’m familiar with.

Here’s the run-down:

  • Windows Defrag – installed with Windows.
    •  this is provided with (I believe) all versions since Windows 98.
  • Diskeeper – retail
    • - this is the commercial version that was licenced to Microsoft for use with Windows.
    • Search for the older free “Diskeeper Lite 7.0.418″
  • Pirisoft Defraggler – free
  • O&O Defrag – retail, search for older version 4 which was free.
  • Norton Speed Disk – retail

I have not used the following, but they appear to be worth a look:

WARNING – if you use hard-drive encryption, defragging may cause your drive to become unreadable.  Defrag with caution.

Happy Defragging!

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Mozilla cache folder

Monday, October 23rd, 2006

Due to my UNIX background,  I’ve found it helpful, for both security and performance reasons to relocate your ‘cache’ or temporary files to a new location (Unix/Linux gurus may prefer /tmp/) here’s the simple process for doing this on a Windows machine using Firefox.

This is useful for several reasons:

* Moving many of your ‘tmp’ files/folders to a single location makes it easier to “clean house”.
* If you move ‘tmp’ to a separate drive or partition (like in UNIX), your primary drive will be less fragmented and may even show increased performance.

Firefox didn’t make this as easy to change as MSIE, but it’s a trivial matter. Find and edit the prefs.js file in your Profile directory and add the following…

user_pref(”browser.cache.disk.parent_directory”, “C:\\temp\\Mozilla”);

Alternately, you can type “about:config” in the URL/address line of the browser and add the String…

browser.cache.disk.parent_directory with a value of “C:\\temp\\Mozilla”

If you want to keep your existing cached files, you can always copy them over from the old location.

For Windows XP with MSIE6/7, the disk cache location is easily changed in the Internet Control Panel, on the General tab, Settings button. Microsoft seems to change that control panel with every new OS/browser version, but it’s generally named similarly on different configurations.

Good luck !

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