How do you short-stroke a hard drive?

N

natermeister

Limp Gawd
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Dec 26, 2005
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I've never done this before, but I'm picking up a pair of Western Digital 640GB (the AALS version) and I'm going to at least try it to see what happens. I know that Hitachi makes a tool for short stroking their hard drives, but I don't know about Western Digital.

Short-stroking just seems like a fancy way of saying 'partitioning', but I didn't know if you can limit partions to certain areas of the disk itself. Any ideas here?
 
Yeah, im looking to short-stroke my WD 640 AAKS as well

would be awesome if anyone here can help!
 
Just partition the front part of the disk. That is usually the OD, or "outer disk", which has the fastest speeds.

Any partitioning tool will be fine. I would strongly suggest against manually setting your max LBA, because you could simply just use the MD/ID (middle, inner disk) part as your second partition for additional storage data.
 
Adidas4275 said:
Any partitioning tool that is recommended that has those options?
Click to expand...

You can do it wihin Windows. Start->Right click computer, click Manage. Click on Disk Manager on the left.

Find the disk drive that you're looking for, delete any partitions (backup your data) on it, then create a new partition and set it to only ~%25-30 (I don't know exactly what amount you should use) of the space through the partition wizard, then create another primary (or not and leave the data space unused) for your storage.

Edit: If you're planing to do this on your OS drive, you'll need to shrink the partition outside of the OS using GParted (linux live CD that's built for storage utils) and/or just hook up your future OS drive like above while in Windows, disconnect your current OS drive, and then install Windows.
 
When you reduce a hard drive's capacity via Windows or the BIOS, does it automatically use the outer tracks of the platters? That's all I'm really concerned about, as long as that gets done, I don't care how it is accomplished.
 
It should, AFAIK. I would like some input on some others just to make sure I'm also getting my facts straight.

Partitioning the front of the disk should, because you're at LBA 0, which is at the outer disk.
 
"Real" short-stroking doesn't use the rest of the drive though - you make a partition for a small percentage of the drive and then leave the rest unpartitioned, which is supposed to keep the drive from ever moving the heads to that portion of the drive. Simply partitioning the drive into two partitions isn't really going to do anything for you because the heads will still seek to the other partition. And if you are that desperate for speed, why not just go RAID?

I'd say short-stroking is a pretty niche technique nowadays - I doubt the speed benefit is worth it. If you do it, post some benchmarks.
 
I am going to use RAID, I'm just trying to get the fastest possible setup for the least possible amount of money.
 
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