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