Rereading this article;
http://lifehacker.com/how-to-short-stroke-your-hard-drive-for-optimal-speed-1598306074it says;
"Connect the drive you want to short-stroke to your machine as a secondary volume and run HD Tune's Benchmark test. You'll see your hard drive's transfer rate (the blue line) creep down as the test runs.
When the test is complete, look at the graph and find a point where you see a significant drop off in transfer speed. Every hard drive is different, so look at your graph closely to identify your hard drive's sweet spot.
Once you find the sweet spot, that point is the size you want to make your main partition. So, for example, if you see the speed drop off significantly at 100 GB, you'll want to make a 100 GB main partition."
It says nothing about choosing -where- to partition the HD, just -what size- to limit it down to.
That sort of implies to me that one might possibly not even use HD Tune, but just take a very large HD, reduce the size of the partition to say 10%, or with my 750GB made over into 250GB = 33%, and automatically get improved performance, which is similar to what tomos posted, quote:
"I didnt get a chance to read any of those^ links yet, but I remember when 2TB drives came out, reading an article saying that if you made a smallish partition, say 150GB, that the speed of that partition would be a lot faster - the claim was along the lines of: the bigger the drive, the faster that partition would be. But I dont know how multiple platters fit into that."
IOW (to me), 'the bigger the drive, the denser the platter'.
Repartitioning a 1TB or 4TB drive to 200GB just limits the side-to-side movement of the read-write arm, speeding it up.
The 'magic trick' of true 'short stroking' as per the HD Tune article, is to somehow position your downsized partition on the outside of the platter, not the inside.
I'm not sure if HD Tune can do repartitioning, or if it just tells you results done with other software.
HD Tune does tell you overall results, helping you to determine if you've chosen the slower inside tracks or the faster outside tracks.
But how would you be able to intentionally choose the inside or outside of the platter? (plz excuse me if I'm using wrong terminology for 'platter'/HD disk).
I'm oversimplifying this in order to solicit any feedback.
Hmm, one way...just divide up the whole drive into multiple partitions, say 10 of them (10% per partition), then run speed tests on each partition until you find the fastest one.
Then...deactivate the other partitions, and leave the fastest one active as Primary.
That way, -any- speed testing software will tell you which partition is fastest.
BTW, an earlier version of HD Tune v255 at MajorGeeks is now shareware, whereas it is the HD Tune Pro 5-something that is $34.95.
