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HDD - Hard Disk Drive
| What you say?? How do you overclock your hard drive? It's very simple Watson. Running your PCI bus higher than it's recommended 33.33 MHz. This will overclock all devices that use the PCI bus. So, for maximum performance of a hard disk (that is not worn out or has errors) and if you don't have a mission critical system, then you can force the PCI bus up to around 40 MHz without causing any REAL damage to your drive/s. An extended period of time running at or above 40MHz will cause damage, and then it is YOUR WARRANTY that you will have expired. If you are like me, you may have already done that in the past! There are a couple of differences between CPU architectures and specifically chipsets that do not allow Intel CPUs to change the multiplier. In this situation, you are very limited to the FSB increases and so it is essential to correctly calculate your PCI frequency ( FSB divided by PCI divider ) to ensure your system will boot at the new overclock setting. Below I recommend a couple of nice tools which you can use to test out your hard drives maximum data throughput and thereby it's efficiency and performance. You can see on my Benchmarks page what my ATTO scores are ... they are not great scores I'm ashamed to say, but getting an EVEN write/read speed is the key -this score is in kilobytes per second 98000 k is obviously 98 MB/sec. Now how about you download ATTO install and run it. HUH? To get the best results you are going to need to DEFRAGMENT your hard disk first. You can either follow the link or you can click on Start-Run and type in 'defrag' which will get you to the same place if you are running Windows ME or earlier. In windows 2k/XP/NT please click Start-Programs-Accessories-System Tools-Disk Defragmenter to get the ball rolling. Now there is a tool called SiSoft Sandra 2003 which analyses various system performance levels and you can download her HERE. The good thing about Sandra is she gives an approximation on most things and has options up the wazzoo. Have you ever heard of ATA? It's abbreviated to ATA because the name is a bit elaborate - Advanced Technology Attachment. ATA drives are IDE drives (Integrated Drive Electronics). ATA2 (aka ATAPI=Packet Interface) is the standard by which all HDDs/CDROMs/ZIP drives in the past have interfaced with the system. The connection type is IDE and this simply means onboard electronics on the hard disk itself. Ultra ATA 33/66/100/133 are simply DMA (Direct Memory Access) modes of communication and are 2/3/4/5 times the PIO speed of mode 4 respectively. PIO is really old but all hard disks still support it. Apart from ATA being slightly different in that it stems from a much older system -the AT system, old pre-pentium systems ran with a 16MHz bus. This they called the AT bus and so the AT system came to be. ATA was designed specially for hard disks and so it was termed the AT Attachment. There are a few new changes to ATA like Ultra ATA. The standard which your drive uses is directly related to the bios and hard disk values and through to the Operating System in some most cases. Things like ACPI and S.M.A.R.T for hdds are features supported in the BIOS (though not all drives have these options). There is a newcomer to the hard disk field called Serial ATA (SATA) and this allows speeds up to 150 MB/Second although it uses a very different interface/connector to your motherboard. If you buy a SATA hard disk you might be surprised to find that there are no programs which NEED 150 MB/sec, nor are there any speed improvements over the ATA133/100 controllers. However by the time there IS an application needing that speed, you'll probably find yourself buying another motherboard anyway. I think SATA may be a waste of time until office applications and 64 bit processors come into mainstream use in 2004. Now for those of you who are wanting something more of an all-round benchmark program but need a little accuracy try PC MARK 2002 for the 3 main benchmarked devices. Or if you feel none of this made any sense and I'm talking out of line please visit this technical FAQ page for some glossary type and background information. hehehe... have fun y'all! |