SAN FRANCISCO – Solid-state drives are all the rage lately, thanks to their high transfer speeds and ultrafast access times, but most people still use cheap, spacious mechanical hard drives. Unfortunately, mechanical hard drives also constitute one of the most significant performance bottlenecks in modern computer systems. Even when paired with the fastest processors and lots of memory, a slow hard drive will drag down the a system’s overall performance and responsiveness, which is why upgrading to an SSD usually yields such significant performance gains.

If upgrading to a solid-state drive isn’t the cards for you right no, you can improve the performance of your hard drive through a technique colloquially known as “short stroking.” In simple terms, short stroking a drive means partitioning it so as to use its highest-performing sectors. Hard drives perform differently depending on where data is stored on their platters. Knowing where the fastest sections of the drive are and partitioning the drive to take advantage of them are the keys to optimizing it.

Finding the Sweet Spot

Generally, the smaller you make the initial, primary partition on a hard drive, the better that volume will perform. But no one likes to be limited by a tiny volume size, so it’s very useful to be able to determine where transfer rates begin to drop off on a hard drive. With that information in hand, you can tune your partition to balance overall performance against volume size.

All you need is a benchmark tool like HD Tune or HD Tach that evaluates performance across an entire drive and graphs the results. We used HD Tune in our tests.
To measure a hard drive’s performance, you’ll need access to a system that already has a fully functional OS installation on another drive. Connect the drive you want to test to this system as a secondary volume, and then run the benchmark tool. You’ll notice that performance starts at a relatively high level and then gradually tapers off. For this article, we tested a 1TB Western Digital Velociraptor drive and initially saw transfer rates in the vicinity of 210 megabytes per second, which gradually slowed to about 116 MBps. Similarly, access times were fastest in the early part of the test and grew slower as the test progressed. This phenomenon occurs because hard drives are fastest when they access data from the outermost tracks on its platters. Given a constant spindle speed (10,000 rpm, in the Velociraptor’s case), the drive’s read/write heads can simply cover a larger area in a shorter amount of time when positioned over the outer edges of the platter, resulting in better performance.
For optimal system performance, you need to place your OS and all of your most commonly used applications and files in the fastest areas on the drive. Accomplishing this goal involves creating a primary partition of the correct size on the drive and then installing your OS and apps there. You can partition and use the remainder of the drive, too, but you should store only infrequently accessed data there.

With the Velociraptor hard drive we tested, performance began to drop noticeably at about the 200GB mark, as the HD Tune graph above indicates. By the 300GB mark, transfer rates had fallen by about 50 MBps from their initial speed, and they continued to decline from there. 200GB is plenty of space for a primary partition, so that’s the size we’d make ours.

Once you’ve identified the sweet spot on your drive, create a primary partition of the optimal size. You can do this either during the initial setup phase (when installing the OS) or while the drive is connected to a system whose OS is already installed. To create a partition during a fresh installation of Windows, follow the on-screen prompts during the first phase of the setup process until you reach the point of choosing a target drive. Then click Drive Options (advanced), select your drive on the resulting screen, and specify the partition size. To create a partition on a drive connected to a system that already has Windows installed, connect the drive, boot into Windows, click the Start button, type Disk Management in the Search/Run field, and press Enter. The Disk Management utility will open and, if it detects a new blank drive, will usually launch a wizard. If no wizard launches, right-click the entry for the drive in the list at the bottom of the window, and choose the option to create a new volume. Because Windows uses binary measurements in megabytes to specify partition sizes, 1 gigabyte contains 1024 megabytes. Consequently, in specifying our 200GB partition, we had to identify a partition size of 204,800MB (200 × 1024).

Performance Testing

To gauge the performance benefits of short-stroking a hard drive, we ran a couple of popular benchmarks–HD Tune 5.0 and PCMark 7–on our 1TB Velociraptor hard drive, first with a single partition that spanned the entire drive and a second time with a primary partition consisting of the drive’s highest-performance, first 200GB of space.
WD Velociraptor 1TB w/ 1TB partition

WD Velociraptor 1TB w/ 200GB partition

Improvement

HD Tune 5.0 (read test)

Average transfer rate

164.1 MBps

194.4 MBps

18.46%

Minimum transfer rate

116.2 MBps

181.7 MBps

56.37%

Maximum transfer rate

207.3 MBps

210.7 MBps

1.64%

Burst rate

336.0 MBps

335.2 MBps

-0.24%

Access time*

7.13 ms

5.43 ms

23.84%

PCMark 7 Secondary Storage Benchmark

Overall score

2699

2743

1.63%

Starting applications

5.9 MBps

6.05 MBps

2.54%

Importing pictures

11.74 MBps

12.17 MBps

3.66%

Video editing

21.11 MBps

21.36 MBps

1.18%

Gaming

7.97 MBps

8.03 MBps

0.75%

Windows Media Center

8.09 MBps

8.11 MBps

0.25%

Windows Defender

2.71 MBps

2.82 MBps

4.06%

Adding music

1.34 MBps

1.34 MBps

0.00%

* In milliseconds; on this measure, lower scores indicate better performance.

Test system: Intel Core i7-2700K, Asus P8Z68-V Pro (Z68 Express), 8GB DDR3-1600, Western Digital Raptor 150GB (OS), Nvidia GeForce GTX 285, Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

A hard drive’s access times and minimum transfer rates benefit most from short stroking, though the average transfer rate will also jump significantly. According to HD Tune, our drive’s minimum transfer rate increased from 116.2 MBps to 181.1 MBps, a boost of more than 56 percent. Also, our drive’s average access time decreased from 7.13 ms to 5.43 ms, an improvement of about 23.8 percent. And the drive’s average transfer rate saw a nice gain of 18.46 percent, from 164.1 MBps on the 1TB partition to 194.4 MBps on the optimized 200GB partition.

PCMark 7′s Secondary Storage benchmark–a suite of trace-based tests that measure performance of simulated real-world workloads, rather than raw transfer speeds and access times (as HD Tune does)–tells a somewhat different story. Though the gains reported by PCMark 7 are less dramatic than those identified by HD Tune, system performance improved nearly across the board. The drive’s overall score increased by 1.63 percent after short stroking, with the biggest gain coming in the Windows Defender test, which saw an improvement of 4.06 percent.

Ultimately, short-stroking a hard drive won’t raise your hard drive’s performance to the level of a solid-state drive. Nevertheless, the right partition configuration can yield tangible gains, as our test results show. A fast storage subsystem usually delivers perceptible performance improvements for the end user, so if you’re stuck with a hard drive in your system, why not ensure that it’s configured for peak performance?

By Chris Byers
June 8, 2010

April 23, 2010

Iomega recently released its eGo line of portable hard drives that is especially designed for road warriors. Available in three colors – red, blue and silver – these external hard drives have an aluminum enclosure and a Drop Guard feature that can take a drop of up to 1.3 meters – 40% above the industry average. They also come with a suite of backup and anti-virus software, including the McAfee VirusScan Plus, Iomega QuikProtect, EMC Retrospect Express Backup software, and MozyHome Online Backup service

Retailing from P4,270 for the 320GB USB2.0 silver model to P6,645 for the 500GB FW4 USB2.0 red model, eGo hard drives are available from MSI-ECS, distributor of Iomega in the Philippines.

April 15, 2010

Transcend Information Inc., maker of storage and multimedia products, has launched its StoreJet 25D3 2.5-inch shockproof portable hard drive, one of the first USB 3.0 compatible peripherals introduced to the market. The SuperSpeed USB 3.0 model offers better performance than USB 2.0 external hard drives, with real-world transfer speeds of up to 90MBs.

The StoreJet 25D3 USB 3.0 portable hard drive is backwards compatible with USB 2.0, allowing users to access their files from nearly any computer. It also has a shock-dampening system that incorporates internal suspension technology. While the sleek, mirror-like exterior enhances tactile and visual appeal, the advanced internal hard drive suspension system helps prevent damage from accidental slips or falls during travel that may result in massive data loss.

April 13, 2010

WD, a storage industry pioneer, announced that it is now shipping WD VelociRaptor 450 GB and 600 GB hard drives, the next generation of its 10,000 RPM SATA family of hard drives. The new WD VelociRaptor hard drive is designed for blade servers, high-performance PCs, Mac computers, professional workstations, as well as 1U and 2U rack servers that require both high performance and capacity. As the only 10,000 RPM SATA hard drive in the market today, the WD VelociRaptor hard drive now comes packed with twice the capacity and up to 15% performance increase over the previous generation.

It is built with enterprise-class mechanics that provide 24/7 durability under high-performance demands and packs up to 600 GB of capacity into a 2.5-inch enterprise form factor. The WD VelociRaptor drive is also available in the IcePack enclosure, a 3.5-inch mounting frame with a built-in heat sink – a factory customization that fits the drive into a standard 3.5-inch system bay and keeps it cool when installed in a high-performance desktop chassis and 3.5-inch HDD form factor enterprise chassis.

The WD VelociRaptor 3.5-inch hard drives are available at Axis Global Technologies Inc. and ATP Peripherals (Phils.). The 2.5-inch hard drives are under evaluation with OEM customers and will be available through select commercial distributors within this quarter.

February 8, 2010

WD Caviar Black and WD RE4 2TB
www.wdc.com

Western Digital announced that it is now shipping desktop 7200 RPM 2TB hard drives and is qualifying with OEMs enterprise-class hard drives based on WD’s 500 gigabytes-per-platter technology. The popular family of WD Caviar Black drives, now led by the new 2TB capacity, is perfect for gaming, high-performance desktop systems and workstations; while the WD RE4 2TB is suited for servers, network attached storage and storage networks.

High-performance hard drives by an industry leader in performance, WD Caviar Black and WD RE4 2TB drives combine 7200 RPM spin speed, 64MB cache, dual stage actuator technology, SATA 3 gigabits per second (Gb/s) interface, and an integrated dual processor to deliver ultimate performance in a maximum-capacity drive.

“WD Caviar Black 2TB hard drives maximize the features and functionality of power computing applications such as gaming, photo editing, user generated multimedia and video,” said Jim Morris, senior vice president and general manager of WD’s client storage systems. “With the selection of WD Caviar Black hard drives, WD desktop customers receive the best possible mix of capacity, performance and reliability that is required for intense desktop computing.”

“Specifically designed for enterprise-class applications, WD’s RE4 2TB drives incorporate the best combination of features, optimum performance, and superior reliability that customers have come to expect from WD,” said Tom McDorman, vice president and general manager of enterprise storage solutions for WD. “Our enterprise products are directly aimed at customers who require additional features and extensive testing that are necessary for high-end enterprise environments.”

WD Caviar Black 2 TB and WD RE4 2TB hard drives feature the following:

Dual processor- Twice the processing power to maximize performance.

Dual actuator technology- A head positioning system with two actuators that improves positional accuracy over the data track(s). The primary actuator provides coarse displacement using conventional electromagnetic actuator principles. The secondary actuator uses piezoelectric motion to fine tune the head positioning to a higher degree of accuracy.

IntelliSeek- Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration.

StableTrac- The motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking, during read and write operations.

NoTouch ramp load technology- The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit.

Additional Features for WD RE4 2TB Enterprise Hard Drives
WD RE4 drives feature 1.2 million hours MTBF, Active Power Save, enhanced RAFF technology, multi-axis shock sensor, native command queuing (NCQ), pressure sensors, third generation dynamic fly height, time limited error recovery (TLER), and an extensive and enhanced testing process to ensure long-term reliability for demanding enterprise applications.

Price and Availability
The WD Caviar Black 2TB (model WD2001FASS) hard drives and WD RE4 2TB (model WD2003FYYS) hard drives are distributed by Axis Global Technologies and ATP Peripherals (Phils) and are available through select resellers. Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) for the WD Caviar Black 2TB drive are P 15,650 for WD2001FASS model and P20,800 for WD2003FYYS. Both drives are covered by a five-year limited warranty.

By Lincoln Spector
February 1, 2010

By Luis Anthony G. Oliveros
September 23, 2009

Western Digital, one of the biggest players in the data storage market, has unveiled the freshest redesigns to their popular line of external storage solutions, My Book and My Passport. These plug-and-play models have also been equipped with the new WD SmartWare software hardware encryption as a double layered security for your digital files.

My Book Essential / My Book for Mac
Now in a sleeker 48x165x135mm body, the My Book Essential and My Book Essential for Mac are offered in storage capacities ranging from 500GB to a very spacious 2TB.

These external drives connect via a USB 2.0 port and carries an illuminated capacity gauge that lets you know just how much space is available. They also utilize WD GreenPower Technology which lowers internal drive power consumption by up to 30% and a sleep mode during idle times.

“Keeping an extra copy of your digital life used to be a painstaking, manual task undertaken only by the most expert and diligent of users. WD’s new My Book Essential and My Book for Mac external hard drives, powered by WD SmartWare, have finally made it easy enough so that anyone can do it,” said Dale Pistili, VP of Marketing for WD’s branded products group. “WD’s new drives combine massive storage capacity, visual backup and hardware encryption, so consumers can now actually see their digital life safe in one place.”

While the My Book Essential is compatible with various Windows operating systems including Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7, the My Book Mac runs Mac OS X Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard, and is even compatible with Apple TimeMachine.

My Passport Essential / My Passport for Mac
The My Passport Essential and My Passport for Mac external hard drives are more than 20% smaller than their previous generation models. At 15x83x110mm, they tip the scale at a mere 0.20kg for better storage and mobility. These are offered in storage capacities from 320GB to 1TB and come in different colors, including blue, red and silver in addition to the standard black and white.

“The smaller and sleeker design of WD’s redesigned My Passport drives, combined with the intuitive visual backup experience of WD SmartWare software, makes this drive a smart and secure, travel-friendly storage choice,” Pistilli said. “These ultra-portable drives are a stylish and spacious storage solution for consumers to confiddentaly backup, store and carry their entire digital lives.”

The WD My Passport Essential hard drives are formatted for machines running Windows operating systems  while the WD Passport for Mac are designed for Mac computers and are even compatible with Apple TimeMachine.


WD SmartWare
Along with these newly revitalized storage solutions is the WD SmartWare, Western Digital’s own beefy security software. It comes in a straightforward user interface that displays the contents of the plugged hard drive and even displays them in categories (e.g. movies, videos, audio, etc.).

The WD SmartWare presents a security feature that combines the ubiquitous user-selected password protection with military-grade 256-bit hardware encryption. This is a data protection feature usually present only among expensive data storage system.

In addition, it allows you to make automatic, continuous data backup (with a progress bar to easily track backup as it completes), retrieve data to its original location folder whether it may be lost data or an  overwritten file. Its settings are flexible enough to allow you to customize drive security, run diagnotics and  manage power settings, among others.

July 1, 2009

Western Digital Debuts First 2TB HD

By Melissa J. Perenson

Published in the May 2009 print edition of PC World Philippines

Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB

$299

www.wdc.com

The  Caviar Green 2TB WD20EADS hard drive from Western Digital boosts the capacity game to a whole new level. This $299 disk can hold two terabytes– it’s the first to do so, and a boon to anyone with a large data archive or media library. Previously, Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB drive led in capacity.

This internal unit provides an areal density of 400 gigabits per squar inch on four 500GB platters. And WD bills it as environmentally friendly for its lower power use.

In our PC World Test Center trials, it came in fifth among all hard drives tested, one place better than the 1.5TB Seagate unit. It lagged our performance leaders (the WD RE3 Enterprise 500GB and the WD Velociraptor) on some results– notably, write-intensive disk imaging in WorldBench 6. But on other core metrics, the 2TB drive was competitive. It finished our test for writing files and folders in 112 seconds and handled our test for writing large files in 92 seconds, placing behind the performace leaders by 12 seconds or less.

The drive comes with several WD technologies that, the company says, allow the model to achieve its baance of price and preformance and optimize its inner workings. For example, StableTrac reduces vibrations but securing the motor shaft at both ends, permitting accurate head tracking during read and write operations.

The $299 orice tag may seem high, but at 15 cents per gigabyte, it is fairly competitive with that of other drives. The cost of recovering a ginormous 2TB drive that is dead or damaged, however, could be huge.

That the drive isn’t quite top-of-the-heap performer should not deter people with large data libraries. Nor should it put off digital media enthusiasts. Those users will rightly crave this drive.

Western Digital (WD), one of the storage industry’s pioneers and long-time leaders, today officially launched a new product branding system in Philippines. Named BGB for Blue, Green and Black, the company has refined its 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch hard drive product names to distinct usage categories for desktop and notebook applications, symbolized with colors. The new naming system aims to simplify the hard drive buying processes for Philippine users in choosing the WD hard drives that are in line with their work styles: “always on the move”, “environmentally conscious” or “go getter” users.

“Having been serving Philippine market for many years now, WD has been among the most preferred hard drive brand for both MNC and local PC manufacturers in Philippines,” said Tod Yagi, Western Digital senior manager, WW Channel Marketing, Component Business Units. “With the new product branding system, Philippine customers can have a much better understanding of WD product classification, and we are also making it very simple for every storage buyer to quickly find the right drive for them.”
 

WD’s BGB campaign provides customers the “Power of Choice”. 

 WD Caviar Blue

WD Caviar Blue hard drives are available with either SATA or EIDE interface in a variety of cache sizes with a multitude of available features to deliver rock solid performance and ultra-cool and quiet operation. Pick the drive that suits your needs with the confidence in knowing that all WD Caviar Blue drives are built to the highest standards of quality and reliability. With capacities ranging from 80GB to 750GB, these drives are the perfect solution for family and business computing.
 

WD Scorpio Blue

WD Scorpio Blue 5400RPM 2.5-inch SATA and EIDE hard drives from Western Digital deliver fast and ultra-quiet performance hand-in-hand with low power consumption. These hard drives are designed with ruggedness, reliability, and data-protection features that actively watch over valuable data. Available in capacities from 80GB to 500GB, these drives feature a 3Gb/s SATA interface and 8MB cache. WD Scorpio Blue hard drives are designed for portable digital devices of all kinds, including notebook computers, external storage, and digital media players.
 

WD Caviar Green

Available in capacities from 500GB to 2TB, WD Caviar Green SATA hard drives reduce power consumption by up to 40% and offer best-in-class acoustics and operating temperature. WD Caviar Green drives make it possible for energy-conscious customers to build systems with higher capacities and the right balance of system performance, ensured reliability, and energy conservation. They are ideal for PCs, external storage and other devices that require lower power consumption and cool, quiet operation.
 

WD Caviar Black

WD Caviar Black high-performance 3.5-inch SATA drives combine 7200RPM speed, 32MB cache, SATA 3Gb/s interface, and an integrated dual processor for fast performance in demanding systems. Rock solid mechanical architecture and enhanced reliability features help protect the drive and the data stored on it. Available in capacities from 500GB to 1TB, and backed by a five-year limited warranty, these drives are ideal for power computing applications such as multimedia, video and photo editing, and maxed out gaming computers.
  

WD Scorpio Black 

WD Scorpio Black 7200RPM SATA 2.5-inch hard drives from Western Digital combine a lightning-fast 7200RPM spin speed with a SATA 3Gb/s interface and 16MB cache to deliver desktop-class performance. With 5400RPM-equivalent power consumption there is no compromise in battery life. In addition, these hard drives are designed with ruggedness, reliability, and data-protection features that actively watch over valuable data. Available in capacities up to 320GB, these hard drives are perfect for laptop users who require maximum capacity and lightning-fast performance.

To commemorate the launch of the new product branding, WD introduced industry’s first 2TB hard drive – the WD Caviar Green 2TB drive.  This new 3.5-inch platform is based on WD’s industry-leading 500GB/platter technology (with 400Gb/in2 areal density) with 32MB cache, producing drives with capacities of up to 2TB, which is the largest capacity in the market.  WD Caviar Green hard drives reduce power consumption by up to 40% and offer best-in-class acoustics and operating temperature.  Based on WD’s exclusive GreenPower Technology, these drives are designed to deliver power savings as the primary attribute. 

“Saving power without sacrificing storage capacity is what consumers want, and what many businesses are requiring today.  With the launch of the new WD Caviar Green 2TB hard drive, customers receive the additional capacity needed to operate today’s highly advanced programs and high-resolution digital files while using less power than typical drives with similar performance and capacities,” Tod further averred.

A number of advanced technologies enable the speed, capacity and performance of WD’s Caviar Green 1.5TB and 2TB hard drives. Those include: StableTrac, which secures the motor shaft at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking during read and write operations; IntelliPower, which fine-tunes the balance of spin speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance; IntelliSeek, which calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration; and NoTouch ramp load technology, which is designed to ensure the recording head never touches the disk media resulting in significantly less wear to the recording head and media, as well as better drive protection while in transit.
The WD Caviar Green 2TB is available at select resellers and distributors. MSRP for the WD Caviar Green 2TB hard drives (model WD20EADS) is P14,495.  More information about WD Caviar Green desktop drives may be found on the company’s Web site.