hard drive optimization

[senodge]

I read somewhere on the web on how one could "speed up" their hard drive.However, I've since formatted my drive and can't find the info anywhere.Any suggestions(besides pulling my head out of my @55)?
Thanks,
Jay(senodge@earthlink.net)

[bdog]

There are several ways to speed up you hard drive. First, defragment it regularly, you'd be suprised at the difference it makes if the disk was badly fragmented. Next in the control panel, under system, set the computers role as a network server. This improves the disk caching. Next manually set the virtual memory. Set it to around two and on half times your ram, using the same number for min and max, but never less than 100mb. This should reduce disk swapping for memory, and free up the drive for faster data transfer. There are a couple vcache settings in the system.ini that should help a little. If you want them let me know.

[drojman]

Also, win98 realigns the programs you use the most when you defrag, so they start faster and access hd faster. I have heard that you only want to set your role to network server if you have more than 64mb ram...

[dawgtuff]

bdog-very good advice!
drojman-I've heard Win98A doesn't do this very well(realigns).Has Win98B corrected this?

[jonathankeeping]

A good tip for speeding up larger HDs (6.4BGB+) is to increase the cluster size. The FAT32 default is 4k cluster sizes. If you increase this to 16k cluster sizes, you will note an increase in speed. This is especially true for older DOS programs such as scandisk.