Bill Ridgeway added these comments in the current discussion du
jour ...
I am thinking of ways and means of improving the speed of a
Client's computer. The hard disk is formatted as FAT and
there is said to be an improvement of speed when using NTFS
rather than FAT. One way of doing this would may be to
backup, reformat, reinstall Windows and software. However,
although this, together with re-configuring software
(including networking) does take a considerable time.
Let me give you an alternative perspective on the performance
differences I have seen on an older XP Pro SP1 PC with an AMD 1.6
gig CPU and only 512 meg memory and a relatively slow HD and a
newer PC running XP SP2, an AMD Athelon 2.6 GHz, 4 gig memory and
a relatively fast SATA HD. Also, a Maxtor 300 gig USB external.
Once I get the "attention" of an NTFS partition (my HD has a
primary and 2 extended partitions), I believe the sustained
read/write speed is higher than FAT32. However, on both my PCs,
NTFS seems to "forget" its folder tree and wants to reload it
when I haven't accessed the drive for minutes or hours. It is as
if the folder tree, which I would think would be in memory and
mirrored to pagefile.sys either expires or NTFS thinks it should
refresh to ensure no changes took place. The bad side is that
getting it to simply display a folder tree can take 30, 60, 90
seconds, at times many minutes!
I have never been able to track this, and I have experimented on
both boxes by converting back to FAT32. For all of its foibles,
such as less security and limits on maximum partition size, FAT32
is noticeably faster to just get a folder tree up. When I say
"get a folder tree up", I mean in Windows Explorer looking for
the contents of folder(s) to open or copy files around my system,
or simply trying to open an existing file in some app such as a
graphics editor, Word, etc.
I would certainly recommend that any/all of your clients run NTFS
on their C:\ for Windows and apps for the many good reasons we
all know, including security and read/write throughput. I might
suggest, though, that you try some benchmarks with FAT32 vs. NTFS
for various kinds of performance, which seems to be your
question. I imagine I'm going to look at least like a contrarian
on this if not a fool, but what I see is what I see.
I was wondering if it may be possible to clone the hard disk,
reformat the original disk and either copy or clone it back
(without changing the format)? This would be considerably
quicker (albeit not eliminating the crap collected over time).
I will also be looking at the possibility of increasing memory
but all slots are filled with what may be the capacity
accepted by the motherboard.
There are really at least 3 things that affect peformance on any
computer wrt throughput, which would be CPU speed, memory amount
and speed, and HD speed. That said, then the O/S, the app(s) and
the specific task(s) may be CPU intensive, memory intensive, HD
read/write intensive or - gasp! - all 3 at once. So, you won't
automagically see a big bump in throughput by adding memory,
especially if your motherboard's are already full and/or you're
at the XP limit of 5 gig.
As to cloning or imaging your HD(s), there's a number of ways to
do that. One really good one is to acquire a good disk imager
such as Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost. When I went looking
for one 2 years ago, I found True Image to have more supporters
and advocates than Ghost. Few people bashed Ghost but more
praised True Image. Now, however, I hear complaints about TI 10.0
(I'm on 9.0), so I don't know. But, you can image to an external
HD and/or optical with one or more CDs/DVDs and do a full restore
of an entire partition, or buy cloning-specific software. It all
depends. But, imaging is far easier and far faster than doing the
nuke and reinstall shuffle which can take days to rebuild a
system and clearly invites a visit from Murphy.
Good luck, Bill. Hopefully you will glean some benefit from my
ramblings. If you have questions/want clarification, just ask.
