I was wondering if I used a second hard drive for my temporary folders (explorer and windows) wouldn’t things on my computer speed up? Is there any other benefits when it comes to speed haveing another hard drive?
You can always repartition your hard drive into several logical drives. Place your swap file on one of the logical drives, making sure you define minumum and maximum size limits. In other words, the swap file should be reconfigured from dynamically adjusting in size as Windows uses it to a locked size.
If the partition for the swap file is large enough, you could relocate the temporary internet folders (internet cache) there as well, but I don’t think this is necessary.
Computer speed is a human misperception. The real speed you allude to is how fast does the hard drive read/write data. Regular weekly/monthly maintenance will improve that “speed.” Runing a utility like Norton Utilies regularly to clean up the detritus on a hard drive helps. So does defragging a hard drive ane emptying the internet cache.
Technically, yes, it does. For example, consider having your virtual memory on physical drive 2 and Windows on physical drive 1. The heads on drive 1 can stay right around the files it needs and the heads on drive 2 can stay over the virtual memory file. Compare this to having both on one physical drive, where the heads will be thrashing around between the location of Windows and the location of your virtual memory.
Realistically, however, no, you won’t notice a very big speed increase. If you just need more space, then go ahead and buy a second drive, and consider the little speed boost to be a side benefit. But if you don’t need the space, your money would be better spent on more RAM or something.
accually I happen to have a few hard drives around that are aprox 800 mb in size and this is how I thought they might come in handy. One thing that I have noticed is that when I copy a large amount of files from one place and paste them to another what happens is the hard drive first reads the info and then records the info in the temp folder then moves the files probably doing some kind of check to make sure what is being moved is completly moved. I have just imagined this in my head I don’t know if this is accuarate. I think I did it with a win 3.1 system and it improved the preformence greatly but that was way back somewhere around 93 and I can’t remember exactly what I did.
If your computer is recent, putting in an 800MB would actually make things run slower, especially if you’re doing a lot of data transfer to and from the 800MB drives. Newer systems have much higher transfer rates (Ultra ATA and Serial ATA systems) than the older systems did. I would imagine that an 800mb drive would operate no higher than PIO Mode 4 (~16.6MB/sec), maybe even lower. If you have an Ultra ATA 100 drive, a motherboard that supports UATA 100, and a proper cable (I haven’t checked - do UATAs still require 80-wire IDE cables?), UATA 100 has a data transfer rate of - you guessed it - 100MB/sec. So, if you’re transferring data from one drive to another, it’s going to transfer at the highest speed of the slowest drive, in this case 16.6MB/sec. If you’re going to add a second drive, make sure it is at least as fast as your current drive, otherwise it’ll make things worse, not better.
critter42