How do I speed up IDE harddisks?

[Hellmund]

I was just wondering if you can get a SCSI card or something that will speed up an old IDE drive? Also what's with the uncached disk space reading with wintune.I got really low reading whereas my brother got a high reading when his drive is full and I got 2 drives that are practically empty
Hellmund

[daveleau]

A SCSI card would only work with SCSI drives. You're IDE drive would'nt plug into the SCSI nor would it be recognized. hdds are difficult to overclock. You get data corruption more often than not and possibly drive failure.

If your drives are ATA66, you can get a Promise ATA66 card but you won't see too much improvement. You could also get a Fasttrakk card which allows you to use both drives as one cutting your seak time in half. I'm not sure if it'd work with ata33 hdds though. One of the Fasttrakk guru's wold have to answer that one. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

[Axel]

Your best bet is to erase all of the programs you no longer avidly use - uninstall them correctly through add/remove programs if you can.

Then get a copy of Norton Speed Disk (www.symantec.com) or Diskeeper (www.executive.com) and run them - they are a bit ( not much ) better than MS scandisk & MS defrag at optimizing your hard drive space.

There is one other possibility - take a look at getting one additional hard drive and then getting a Promise IDE RAID1 setup which will double your access speed and remove the need to do tape back-ups. (www.promise.com)

Other than that - you're stuck with buying a new drive. An ATA66 IDE is a better choice than a SCSI when you consider what you have to pay for a SCSI adapter and the drives are 3 times as expensive.

Lastly, you can find deals on new 6 GB IDE drives with a 5400RPM rating for about $80.00 if you shop around (FRYS). You can also sometimes find used 4GB IDE drives for about $65.00 which might be an improvement over what you have now.

[Stan]

If you want max performance, get a FastTrack RAID IDE controller.
Set up 2 HD in RAID0 (stripe).

More info:
http://www.hardwarecentral.com/hardwarecentral/reviews/1746/1/
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/00q1/000329/index.html

Stan

[Tom Denny]

Yes fast trac 66 is the way to go

Regards
Tom

[parityBit]

What about enabling DMA? Would that make a diff if it is an ultra-DMA drive?

[Hellmund]

Enabling DMA-transfers in the device manager marginally increases performance but you have to have drives/cdroms that support it. My drive do but I haven't seen any difference. Only thing that sped up my drives a bit was increasing the FSB so the PCI frquency was higher(I'm pretty sure IDE and PCI run at same correct if wrong).
Hellmund