By Glenn Hefley
Accessing data on the disk is definitely one of the bottlenecks of computer
speed. If the hard drive is working poorly, heavily fragmented, or lacks enough
free space -- the entire system suffers. If it was just accessing data from
the drive it might not be so bad, but the hard disk is also used by your system
for virtual memory as well. In this article we are going to go over some maintenance
ideas that will keep your hard drive running smoothly, and possibly squeeze
out some extra performance from your system.
Our first tip is to keep the hard drive from becoming overly fragmented. Fragmentation
is the breaking up of files stored on the hard drive. Often our files are deleted,
edited, or moved to different areas, and when this happens the system has to
break your files apart in order to fit them into available space. Imagine, for
example, a row of 10 checkers on a 20 square board. When we start, all the checkers
are next to each other, but if we delete a two checker file, and then add a
3 checker file, our new file is going to be located first in the free two square
space, with one check at the end of the row. If we keep doing this, soon our
files are broken and scattered all over the place.
A heavily fragmented disk drive has to work much harder to access files than
one that is defragmented. Defragmenting means that we run a tool that goes through
our files and puts them back together. This tool, believe it or not is called
a Defragmenter... go figure.
On your XP system it is located at Start->All Programs->Accessories->System
Tools->Disk Defragmenter. If you have very little space left on your hard
drive, this tool is going to run much longer than it normally would. You might
be thinking "well, no doubt, there is more to defragment", and this
is true as well, but without enough "swapping space" some files aren't
going to be able to be defragmented, but the tool will try to do it anyway until
it errors out. A hard disk with no space left can't be defragmented at all.
So first check is to see that you have 10% or more of your drive free before
you run the Defragmenter. You should do this at the very least once or twice
a week.
Once we've done this basic task we can start getting into the details few ever
learn about their hard drives. There is quite a bit to cover, and I'm not going
to spend a great deal of time on history lessons, there are plenty of sources
for that on the Internet, but let's go quickly over file types.
The hard drive in your computer is formatted (I'm sure you have heard that
term), in order for a Operating system to be able to use the hard disk, it must
be formatted into a file type that the OS understands. Believe it or not, there
a many different file system types. Since this article is focused on Windows
users and specifically XP users, I'm not going to spend any time on Linux or
Mac formats.
In our world, right now, there are FAT, FAT32 and NTFS disk formats. If you
have FAT, well bless your heart. Keeping a system running that long is truly
amazing and I'm probably not going to be teaching you anything today. FAT is
from back in the DOS days, and can't handle disk sizes of greater than 2 GIGS
(which back then certainly seemed like a great deal of space). As disk sizes
began to grow, FAT32 came out to fill the need. NTFS came out as a "better"
FAT32. Whether that is true or not is still debated.
If Windows XP or 2000 is the only OS you have on your system (if you don't
have a dual boot with Linux on there somewhere or Win 98), then your hard disk
should be formatted with NTFS. You can check this by opening My Computer, right-clicking
on the drive, choose Properties and the applet will tell you about the drive.
If you do have FAT32, as shown here, you can convert the drive type to NTFS,
with no damage to your files. The command is in the DOS Prompt Command line
( Start->All Programs->Accessories->DOS Prompt).
Close all other programs and be ready to let the computer sit for a while (don't
go web surfing while you are doing this...)
With that window open, the command is :
convert c: /fs:ntfs
There are some other options (switches) you can use for this converstion as
well.
/v
Run in verbose mode. I always set this because I like to see that it is working
and not hung up. If you were going to use this then the command is :
convert c: /fs:ntfs /v
/cvtarea: filename
Specifies a contiguous file, filename, in the root directory as the place holder
for NTFS system files. Don't bother with this if you are a home user, and if
you are not, then you should ask the company SysAdmin before doing this conversion.
/nosecurity
Include this parameter if you want the initial security privileges for all files
and folders to be set so they are accessible by everyone. If you are the only
user, you can set this switch or not, because it isn't going to matter much
to you.
/x
Forces the volume to dismount first, if necessary closing any opened files on
the volume. Use this option if you're on the network and there's concern that
other users may attempt to access the drive during the conversion process.
This is a one-way conversion, at least when using the software included with
Windows XP. There are some utilities out there, like PartitionMagic for example
that could reverse the conversion, but you are probably looking at packing all
of your files onto a external drive and reformatting the hard drive if you want
to go back. Why would you? I have no idea, but there it is.
Further Resources
PartitionMagic
NTFS File System
KLS Backup
In our next part we will talk about tuning some of the advanced settings for
the NTFS file system, and look into the realm of Virtual Memory.
This article may not be copied or distributed in part or in full from this site and is copyright D24 Media Limited.
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