Explain the process of short-stroking a HDD

[Adappy]

(seriously, couldn't they come up with a less innuendo-y term for that? )

Anyways... my 500GB Caviar Black is starting to run out of space, and I have a 1TB (64mb cache) one on the way to replace it. The obvious option would be to just re-install everything to the 1TB drive and...find a use for the 500GB one But, another option I've been thinking about just installing games (the bulk of the data on my harddrive, ~215GB of the ~275GB used) on the 1TB drive, and keeping the 500GB drive for the OS and music/documents/other programs I use (not much space needed for that... 10GB of music, 1.5GB documents/pictures, and Firefox/Thunderbird/Microsoft Office) So another thought I had was "well, maybe I could try messing around with short-stroking that 500GB drive since I won't need much space on it".

Point is... I know what short-stroking is and its benefits... just not how to go about doing it. Do you just shrink the OS partition? Or is it something you have to setup during install?

[Deleted]

It just means not putting any data anywhere but at the earlier stage of the HDD, by leaving a (large) part of the HDD unpartitioned. However by default, operating systems prioritize the earlier parts of the HDD anyway - so performance benefits are often small (if existent) in actually gain in the first place with normal use at the same capacity range.

Hard drives read much faster in the 'early' parts of the drive rather than later. In addition, moving between reading data at earlier parts and then to later takes a lot longer (= even more reduced performance). A lot of people ignore or forget this. A drive may be advertised at 120mb/s for example, but that speed decreases down to as low as 50mb/s at the end of the same drive. Typically significant performance losses can be be measured at 50%+. Flash based storage is unaffected by this.

[Jaerin]

On a consumer basis short-stroking isn't going to benefit you much. Where it is usually used is when you have a large number of relatively slow drives usually SATA or SAS drives and then you make a small 1-10 gig stripe across hundreds of drives. This allows you have extremely fast volumes for things like transaction logs and such for databases.

It also gives you the means to have a lot of spindles available for reads/writes so access times are very fast.

For a consumer machine I would just spend some money on an SSD or two before I'd think about using short-stroking.

[Adappy]

For a consumer machine I would just spend some money on an SSD or two before I'd think about using short-stroking.

SSD's are still too expensive IMHO. I know what short-stroking is and what it can/can't do, and the point is this... I will have a 500GB hard drive with only Windows and a few other minor things installed on it of which I don't see ever going over 75GB (I'm at ~50GB with the stuff I plan on leaving on the drive) Games and everything else will go on the 1TB secondary drive. On second thought, a 64-80GB SSD isn't *as* bad as I thought it'd be, but still... that'd be spending more money on something I don't really need.

So, simply shrinking the partition in the disk manager will work?