File System
Your drives are the biggest bottleneck in your system and there's a few
things that you can do to greatly improve the performance of them. If your main
use for your computer is running applications all day long this is of course a
MUST! Surprisingly the biggest things that slow NTFS down are "features".
You'll want to read a couple of additional articles.
Windows File System clusters explained
Hard Drive Size being reported wrong in Windows
Deleting Windows junk to save 1Gb of space!
Automating Disk cleanup
Turn off indexing
The newer version of NTFS introduces some new "features" One of these is a
file indexing thing that enables you to search for files and also text within
files very quickly. How is this done? Well... every time you add a file it is
logged into a DB that can eat away at your drive space rather quickly and slows
you down while doing so. I would suggest everybody turn this off because I don't
know of anybody who does enough searches on their drives to sacrifice as many
resources as this does.
1. Browse to your hard drive either through Windows Explorer or through
my computer
2. Right click your hard drive icon and select properties.
3. At the bottom of this window you'll see "Allow indexing service to index
this disk for faster searches," turn this feature off for all of your drives
by unchecking the box and clicking ok..
4. After that a window will appear and you'll want to choose apply to all
folders and subfolders if you want the full benefit. You could turn this on
for selective folders that you search frequently. For the most part you want
this off for all of your folders.
Alternate method is disabling the indexing service. I'd do both if I were you ;) |
Convert Fat 32 to NTFS
I won't bore you with the details about the differences between NTFS and
Fat32. You'll just have to trust me on this one. NTFS is faster and more secure
than Fat32 is on larger drives. On smaller like sub 25Gb drives Fat32 is faster.
NTFS's speed advantage only kicks in on higher capacity drives. There's a rather
simple command that isn't very easy to find that will convert your FAT32
partition to NTFS. Open the command prompt by hitting start and then selecting
run and type: "Convert C: /FS:NTFS". Replace C: with whatever the drive letter
you'd like to convert is. Also make sure there is a space between the C: and the
foward slash (/). Once you press enter it will ask you for confirmation and
press Y. Then press Y and enter once more to reboot. It will take between one
hour and 15 minutes to convert to NTFS. Now you can set passwords for files and
use encryption. This also works for windows XP Home. Unfortunately this makes
the default cluster size 512 bytes instead of the 4kb that a clean format of
NTFS provides.
Make NTFS run better ;)
Now that you've converted over to NTFS or you had it already there's a few
things that you'll want to do to make it run faster. NTFS was designed more for
the server market and there's some features that we don't really need and can
either tune a little bit or disable all together.
1. Last access update is another feature that I'd turn off and will help
you get a little more performance out of your hard drive. What is this? NTFS
updates the date stamp on directories whenever it opens the directory. To turn
this rather useless feature off browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem
and change the NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate registry entry to 1
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem]
"NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate"=dword:00000001
2. (some conflicts happen in programs like Norton AV 2003 if LiveUpdate doesn't work then reenable this)Short names is something that is needed for DOS compatibility. Most
of us will want to turn this off. The only time you'll want to leave this on is
if you are supporting DOS or win 3x based clients. I think all of us have some
machines like that in our CLOSET but certainly not in use. To turn this off
you'll have to go browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem
in your registry and change the default value of the
NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation registry entry to 1.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem]
"NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation"=dword:00000001
Or to put both of them to use insert this into your *.reg file
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem]
"NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation"=dword:00000001
"NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate"=dword:00000001
Reboot after making changes.
