I was just talking to someone who is considerably more experienced with computers than myself about my computer woes (too slow, too unstable, blah, blah, blah…). He suggested that I buy more RAM (a no-brainer); but he also suggested something I hadn’t thought about. He said I should buy a fairly small hard drive and use that as the master for all my system files and then use my 40 gig that I have now for all my miscellaneous programs, mp3s, videos, etc. He said this would make everything run ten times faster, including making boot-up take about ten seconds. Does anyone have any advice on this or experience to share? Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Doesn’t make any sense to me, I’m afraid. The boot process consists of opening a bunch of system files and launching a bunch of processes. Whether that’s happening with a small hard drive or a large one shouldn’t make any difference - they’re still the same files and the same processes. It shouldn’t make anything else run any faster either. Maybe someone else can come up with a theory that would explain why it might, but I sure can’t.
You’d be better off making sure you periodically run defrag and disk cleanup. And take a look at what programs are being launched at startup - you might find that there’s a lot of unnecessary crap in there that’s slowing everything else down without actually doing anything for you. Start, Run, msconfig will show you what’s going on at startup.
I think his theory was that since all the system files would be on a smaller (and dedicated) hard drive, it wouldn’t have to go through the rest of my crap to get to what I needed to boot up. Then, I could just access that stuff as needed.
Well, the disk drive doesn’t have to “go through” anything to get to the files it’s looking for. It has an index of the files, so it looks up the one it needs, and goes directly to it. It really shouldn’t matter whether there are 5000 files on the drive, or 100,000. The “lookup” process is so fast, you’d never be able to tell the difference.
A fairly small hard drive would also probably be fairly old, meaning that there’s a good chance that it’s running at a slower speed than today’s HDs.
Your friend might have been talking about moving your swap file (AKA pagefile) to a different physical drive, preferably on a different IDE chain than your primary HD. This can improve performance, but may be more trouble than it’s worth.
Leo Laporte of TechTV said it could result in a 20% boost in system speed, but that figure seems inflated.
i thought along similar lines. i wanted a small 10Krpm SCSI for system … but decided it was too expensive.
i dont think a small “dedicated” hard will offer any improvement. unless it is a high end unit that will be ridiculously expensive.
the reading will be faster if all needed files are physically+ close together, and for this defrag should help …
a good solution IMHO for speeding up bootup is simply to never turn the computer off in the first place 
and if you do run computer all the time you will benefit from a lot of ram. if you keep turning your pc off every half our you will not benefit from a lot of ram as much.
Yea, RAM is good…
Along the lines of the OP, I’ve been kicking around an idea… I can get a small adapter that mounts inside a PC and will connect a CompactFlash card directly to the mobo’s IDE interface via standard ribbon cable. With the ballooning capacities of CF’s, it’s possible to get one that’ll hold an all-the-bells-and-whistles install of Win98SE. Wouldn’t it be possible to use the CF card as the boot drive, while everything else is on other drives? Anyone tried this?
This idea meant more in the old days of computing… not so much anymore. In the good ol’ days, people had lots of hard drives… now, it is more common to have one large one. They are more reliable and larger relative to data storage needs now. Old days, you’d have a System drive, a Files drive, a Programs drive, a Games drive, and a Backup drive.
A smaller hard drive for bootup improves performance by letting you scan and defrag it more frequently (since it is only doing its thing through, say, 5 gigs, rather than 50).
You would be better off, though, maintaining thorough patrolling of what your system is doing. From the Start menu you can run msconfig (just open the Run menu, type it in, and hit enter). You can look at the Startup tab and see exactly what it executes on startup. Programs tend to install a lot of utterly useless background mini-programs that destroy performance and cause a lot of system crashes. Pretty much the only thing I have load at startup (other than the standard Windows programs) is a virus scanner (they DO slow down load times a good deal, but I’d say it is worth it).
Limiting program load, frequent scanning and defrag, and having twice as much RAM (and faster) as you think you’ll ever need are the best ways to speed up boot time. In the end, the hard drive will be the choking point of any computer system until they invent a new system of magnetic/light/whatever storage, and there aren’t many ways to make it faster other than upgrading to a much more expensive hard drive (SCSI is old as hell and I hate it, but it is faster. Sometimes. When it works.) - but SATA (Serial ATA - You have Parallel ATA or IDE drives now, I’d bet) are speeding up drive speeds (a IDE drive has about 135 MB/s throughput, whereas SATA will have 700 MB/s by the middle of the decade - but forget all that for now. Just keep your system clean, and wipe your system every year or so, if you are comfortable doing that.
I’m not sure CF is faster than a high quality hard drive. There are constantly arguments as to whether the IBM microdrive is faster in digital camera applications and the microdrive is a VERY slow hard drive relative to what you probably have in your desktop.
Could it possibly be because the arm doesn’t have to move far?
Notice that the sizes of magnetic plate hard drives has not changed since they were standardized. This is because the plate size has not changed. The chokepoint is in the throughput of data, not in how quickly it can be found and read, and this chokepoint is in the connection type - the old ATA controllers on all motherboards are inefficient and horribly out of date compared to how quickly the rest of technology has progressed.