So, I'm just downloading something with BitComet which usually breaks my speed limit (512kB/s) and goes up to 550...

The speed was around 490-510 with this torrent. Then I opened my defragmenter and saw I should defrag my D drive.

The defrag speed is kinda normal, as it usually goes, but the BitComet speed is 100-150kB/s lower, so I'm like WTF?! The download goes to C, so it's not the same partition. And yes, it is the same HDD.

The drive is Maxtor STM3160815AS. Here's some additional info...
Performance Interface SATA 3.0Gb/s
Capacity 160GB
RPM 7200 RPM
Cache 8MB

Quote from matijapkc :

And yes, it is the same HDD.

That's why.

Quote from r4ptor :

That's why.

But, it's 3GB/s HDD. Downloading is 500kb/s. That leaves 2,9995MB/s for defrag, and the speed is lowered? Of course, there are other files that are transfered all the time, but... I mean, it's weird. It never happned to me before.

Quote from matijapkc :

But, it's 3GB/s HDD.

Proof?

Quote from amp88 :

Proof?

You wanna link to the site?
E: Or should I do a speed test to make you believe?

It doesn't apply to small read or writes. The harddrive has a physical arm that has to move back and forth in order to read and write on different areas on the drive, and it simply can't cope and deliver the "promised" 3Gb/s.

It's very much like having a car that can go 200mph, but if you have to turn all the time then you'd hardly reach top speed.

Sad, but that's how it is of cause, the amount of fragmented files would make it worse too. If you have a lesser fragmented partition, then the speed might be quicker, as the drive wouldn't have to work nearly as much - bottomline: defrag often

Quote from matijapkc :

You wanna link to the site?
E: Or should I do a speed test to make you believe?

Yeah, cos there's no such thing as a 3GB/sec hard drive unless we're talking RAM drives. As r4ptor says, when the disk is active defragmenting it slows down read/write requests for other applications. It's just a limitation of the way rotational hard drives (and solid state drives to an extent) work.

Quote from r4ptor :

defrag often

I was usually doing it every time I was bored, so it was like 4 times a week , but now I didn't do a defrag for like a month, or even more, so yeah, it maybe lowered speed a bit.

E: The thing that is weird even more is that now that I'm defraging C, I get normal download speeds.

Quote from matijapkc :

E: The thing that is weird even more is that now that I'm defraging C, I get normal download speeds.

I/O is fickle. maybe you aren't using the drive as much as before, in terms of what the drive is doing... be it the defrag, the download, or any other I/O bound process.

What does I/O exactly mean?

Quote from matijapkc :

What does I/O exactly mean?

I/O = Input/Output. Basically it means reading from or writing to a type of storage or display medium. Usually in computing it means reading from or writing to a hard disk, but it can also be used for RAM, CPU cache, Graphics devices etc. In very basic terms accessing a conventional rotational hard drive is roughly 1000 times slower than accessing RAM (10 nanoseconds versus 10 milliseconds).

Quote from amp88 :

I/O = Input/Output. Basically it means reading from or writing to a type of storage or display medium. Usually in computing it means reading from or writing to a hard disk, but it can also be used for RAM, CPU cache, Graphics devices etc. In very basic terms accessing a conventional rotational hard drive is roughly 1000 times slower than accessing RAM (10 nanoseconds versus 10 milliseconds).

I know what input/output is, just didn't know for what does I/O stands for.

Sry for double post, but I've got a question... My dad has a PC, very very old PC, it runs on a 2,4GHz Celeron and 1,25GB RAM (added 1 gig about 3 years ago). It has a 40GB HDD and after the latest Windows reinstall (not sure when that was) the tehnician who did it made two partitions, and my dad uses only C so he has 26% free on C and 99% free on D, so I'd like to make these two partitions into one, and hopefully get a speed boost...

Is there any free program that can do this without losing any data?

Quote from matijapkc :

hopefully get a speed boost...

Whether you would actually get a speed boost from merging two partitions is impossible to know unless you know where the partitions actually are on the disk. It would either make it slightly better or slightly worse (considering the age of the disk). It's not really worth doing it. Partitioning a hard drive is a good idea, because it protects data on separate partitions and it allows you to format the Windows partition without losing all of the data on the drive.

Tools like PartitionMagic can do that, but unless you have a strong reason why to do it, I recommend that you don't. Last time I was attempting to do something similar I ended up nearly loosing all my data. Windows partitioning tool creates partitions on the beginning of the disk first and default naming follows this convention, so I think you wouldn't get any speed boost.

I think I would because C is almost full, and if I would merge C and D I would get a lot of free space, which from my XP makes PC faster...

amp @ My dad doesn't use D and he never used D so I can't protect any data anyway.

MadCat @ There not much on that PC, so I think I can make a backup on my flash drive...

Quote from matijapkc :

I would merge C and D I would get a lot of free space, which from my XP makes PC faster...

Proof?

Quote from matijapkc :

amp @ My dad doesn't use D and he never used D so I can't protect any data anyway.

Teach him to do so then?

it can't be faster. it's the same hdd. if anything it would be slower because the one partition has more drive to search. 1 read/write head acting as 2 is not faster than one read/write head acting as one. or better again 2 read/write heads (2 hdd's Raided) is twice as fast as 1 read/write head.

Quote from amp88 :

Proof?

Not the OS... XP=expirience

Quote from amp88 :

Teach him to do so then?

He uses only desktop and "My documents", see what I'm talking about. He has some programs and all are installed on desktop, not in C:\Program Files...

Quote from dadge :

it can't be faster. it's the same hdd. if anything it would be slower because the one partition has more drive to search. 1 read/write head acting as 2 is not faster than one read/write head acting as one. or better again 2 read/write heads (2 hdd's Raided) is twice as fast as 1 read/write head.

It's not about HDD's and partitions, it's just about free space. When there's more free space, head doesn't have to search long for free space to write something and needs less time finding what you opened.

Desktop and Mydocs can be moved on D. He won`t even notice they are there and if you will ever need a windows reinstall, it will make the job easier.

Quote from STF :

Desktop and Mydocs can be moved on D. He won`t even notice they are there and if you will ever need a windows reinstall, it will make the job easier.

How? Just copy-paste it over there or?

You seem to be pretty convinced that more free disk space will give you better performance. This is simply not true. Disk doesn't have to search for free space, that's what file allocation table is for; filesystem knows where is data and where is free space. Improperly configured Windows can get bitchy when you completely run out of disk space and it doesn't have any room where to dump the garbage from RAM, setting swap to a fixed size should usually sort you out.
It's up to you, but I think that the risks outweight the benefit here...

Well, my PC with 160GB gets kinda laggy when I get lower than 35% free space, and cleaning it up helps getting the speed up... I think I could get at least a bit of speed on that old machine...

Are you sure that it wasn't some sort of placebo effect? Perhaps it had more to do with excessive fragmentation which you partially got rid of by deleting stuff. Believe me, there is no technical reason why freeing space on HDD should improve performance in any way (unless you count searching through the whole HDD for some lost file and such things). I had my HDD filled up to the last bit on many occasions without noticing any performance drop.

Still, if you feel like creating one big partition, grab the PartitionMagic, delete the second partition and enlarge the first one to the full size of the disk. But again, make sure you've backed up your data prior to fooling around with this.

Now I think I'm actually gonna do what STF said, as he uses only dsc and MD, so he'll have about 50% free on C...
And I think it wasn't placebo effect, maybe it was a virus in some of the files or something, but performance was clearly lower...
Also, there's an informatics expert, he's good friend of my dad, and once he told me that you need to keep at least 40% free space for the PC to run at full speed and to run normal...