Hard Disk
Tuesday, November 28th, 2006Yeah yeah, long time no write.
A few days ago I finally got around to upgrading the hard disk in my mom’s computer. The old one was 20GB - surprisingly, space was starting to run out. So I put in a new 300GB HDD and got it set up as the primary disk.
What was so surprising to me is how much of a difference it made in the performance of that old computer. Before, the thing would just crawl - something I didn’t really understand, because everything else seemed reasonably good. But it turned out that the HDD was a huge bottleneck for the system.
For normal computer usage, experts tend to say that a faster HDD isn’t going to make that much of a difference. If the “fast” one is only 33% faster than the “slow” one, and you actually use the HDD 20% of the time, you aren’t going to see much overall improvement in your system’s performance. But this seemed to be a special case - the new drive has a much bigger cache, and much faster data transfer rates, so it’s more like 500% faster than the old one.
Now the computer is zippy and my mom is psyched. Hopefully she won’t discover iTunes…
