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    Does the system slow down if you have multiple drives, multiple partitions or etc?

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by titaniummd, May 22, 2006.

  1. titaniummd

    titaniummd Notebook Deity

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    Does the system slow down if you have a) multiple partitions, b) mulitple hard drives, and c) multiple virtual CD ROM / DVD ROM drives (using Daemon or some other CD ROM emulation)?

    I have the physical HD, Optical drive and 4 simulated drives on Daemon and 4 simulated optical CD ROM drives.
     
    titaniummd, May 22, 2006
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  2. Jballa

    Jballa Notebook Geek

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    Keeping things on multiple drives actually helps keep your computer faster. As with cd's files on the most outside track will be found less quickly. If you have multiple drives, that keeps the data more readily accessible because the access time to get to the file is shorter. Simulated drives have higher read speeds as well, due non-optical media. I load images using alcohol 120% and installs are 3x faster then real drives. Hope that helps -JB
     
    Jballa, May 22, 2006
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  3. tianx

    tianx Notebook Geek

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    Well.. with a lot of daemons that will eat up some memory and some cpu cycles, but unless you have a very old system, you wont notice it by much.

    Access times will be faster with Emulated Drives (as HDD read speeds beats optical any day of the week)
     
    tianx, May 23, 2006
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  4. Tim

    Tim Notebook Virtuoso

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    I don't think your speed will be effected very much. Supposedly partitions speed up your hard drives searching.
    Tim
     
    Tim, May 23, 2006
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  5. titaniummd

    titaniummd Notebook Deity

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    I haven't noticed any slowdown but I was wondering if the computer would 'slow down' due to having to 'index' the files and drives.
     
    titaniummd, May 23, 2006
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  6. ikovac

    ikovac Cooler and faster... NBR Reviewer

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    All above true. Daemons will slow your boot time, and perhaps some performance will decrease due to the memory allocation, but of course you will have excellent speeds while actually using them.
    And you are right about the large number of disks and volumes. Try networking and let someone access your computer. Measure the time while it gets to your drives. It is slow. Once it is cached it will work, but the first time is, well...

    Cheers,

    Ivan
     
    ikovac, May 23, 2006
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  7. titaniummd

    titaniummd Notebook Deity

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    I find the advantages of not having to carry disks around and the speed of running off of the hard drive to outweigh a slight increase in boot time.
     
    titaniummd, May 24, 2006
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