Is this an ok setup?

danjama · 1 Apr 2012 at 23:55

Bit paranoid as in game load times are two minutes and over on first load in Rise Of Flight. Mostly fine in other games, but they are all older games (GTRe, il2 1946, RO).

Can anyone explain why windows split my drives the way it has? I think it might be using that 7.8gb partition as a paging file/cache? But my games are all installed on the E drive seperate from everything. Would this cause long loading times? Could I improve performance in any way?

hd setup by danjama, on Flickr

The Halk · 2 Apr 2012 at 00:05

Disk 0 is the one that Windows created, and it's exactly as it should be.

Disk 1 looks to have been partitioned not by Windows, or at least not by Windows install.

There is something called short stroking - it's a bit of a red herring really. Basically you make a partition on the area of the drive that spins the fastest, meaning it runs a bit faster. But the difference is marginal. There's probably not a great deal you could do, I'm afraid.

danjama · 2 Apr 2012 at 00:49

The Halk said:
Disk 0 is the one that Windows created, and it's exactly as it should be.

Disk 1 looks to have been partitioned not by Windows, or at least not by Windows install.

There is something called short stroking - it's a bit of a red herring really. Basically you make a partition on the area of the drive that spins the fastest, meaning it runs a bit faster. But the difference is marginal. There's probably not a great deal you could do, I'm afraid.

Fair enough. Thank you. Is there a way to fix that second drive, so it's all one piece. so to speak?

Surveyor · 2 Apr 2012 at 00:51

Disk E is only 160GB in size suggesting it might be much older and slower than modern drives.

danjama · 2 Apr 2012 at 00:58

Surveyor said:
Disk E is only 160GB in size suggesting it might be much older and slower than modern drives.

I bought it in 2005. It's a SATA 7200rpm Western Digital. Recently formatted though to use only for games.

Surveyor · 2 Apr 2012 at 01:06

danjama said:
I bought it in 2005. It's a SATA 7200rpm Western Digital. Recently formatted though to use only for games.

The data tranfer rate is going to be much lower than on a modern drive.

Download HDTach from here (the author's site link doesn't work).

Run it and compare your results to a pretty decent 1TB drive: