How can I put something in the slow part of a HDD?

[Jon Danniken]

Hello! I bought a 1TB hard drive, and will be reinstalling Windows and such
into it. My current HDD is 500GB, of which I am using 350GB.

My normal course of action is to transfer the contents of the old hard drive
to the new drive, and keep the old hard drive disconnected, with it's data
left intact, as a backup.

So, like always, I will be making a 350GB file on the new drive, and filling
it with the contents of my old drive. However, because this data is more of
a backup than anything else, it will not be accessed frequently, and if
there is a "slow part" of the hard drive, I want to put this 350GB of data
in that part.

Is there a method to put this data in the "slow part" of the hard drive?
Will I need to do this with a partition at that space, and if so, what
freeware/shareware application would you suggest I use for this?

Thanks

Jon

 

[VanguardLH]

Hello! I bought a 1TB hard drive, and will be reinstalling Windows and such
into it. My current HDD is 500GB, of which I am using 350GB.

My normal course of action is to transfer the contents of the old hard drive
to the new drive, and keep the old hard drive disconnected, with it's data
left intact, as a backup.

So, like always, I will be making a 350GB file on the new drive, and filling
it with the contents of my old drive. However, because this data is more of
a backup than anything else, it will not be accessed frequently, and if
there is a "slow part" of the hard drive, I want to put this 350GB of data
in that part.

Is there a method to put this data in the "slow part" of the hard drive?
Will I need to do this with a partition at that space, and if so, what
freeware/shareware application would you suggest I use for this?

If any exist, delete all partitions. Create the OS partition. The
first partition gets allocated at the start (outside) of the hard disk.
Create the 2nd partition using the rest of the unallocated space on the
hard disk. The 2nd one will be on the inside of the platters (the
slower part).

Or get Easeus Partition Manager (Home Edition is free) and create them
in the order you want. Just remember on an unpartitioned hard disk that
the *primary* partitions get created from the outside in (fastest to
slowest part).

 

[Jon Danniken]

If any exist, delete all partitions. Create the OS partition. The
first partition gets allocated at the start (outside) of the hard
disk. Create the 2nd partition using the rest of the unallocated
space on the hard disk. The 2nd one will be on the inside of the
platters (the slower part).

Or get Easeus Partition Manager (Home Edition is free) and create them
in the order you want. Just remember on an unpartitioned hard disk
that the *primary* partitions get created from the outside in
(fastest to slowest part).

Hey Vanguard, thanks. I didn't realize that regular partitions would be
able to do this.

So, would I be able to do this with the "DiskManagement" application that
comes with WinXP? In other words, hook up the bare drive to my working
system and just make three primary partitions, with the last one being the
one I want to end up at the slow part of the drive?

Jon

 

[Rod Speed]

Jon Danniken wrote

I bought a 1TB hard drive, and will be reinstalling Windows and such into it. My current HDD is 500GB, of which I am
using 350GB.

My normal course of action is to transfer the contents of the old hard drive to the new drive, and keep the old hard
drive disconnected, with it's data left intact, as a backup.

Yes, thats a good approach.

So, like always, I will be making a 350GB file on the new drive,

Presumably you mean partition. I wouldnt myself. Its generally
better to just partition the whole of the new drive as a single
partition and copy everything from the original into that.

and filling it with the contents of my old drive.

Its generally better to clone the original drive to the new one, and
telling the cloner to expand the original 500GB partition to 1TB

However, because this data is more of a backup than anything else, it will not be accessed frequently, and if there is
a "slow part" of the hard drive, I want to put this 350GB of data in that part.

That isnt really worth bothering with anymore, drives are so fast now.

Is there a method to put this data in the "slow part" of the hard drive?

Yes, you can certainly create a partition in the slow part of
the drive and copy what you want on the slow part into that.

Will I need to do this with a partition at that space,
Yes.

and if so, what freeware/shareware application would you suggest I use for this?

You dont say which version of Win, but all the recent ones since
95, including XP and 7 can all do that with what comes with Win.

With XP and 7 you create partitions in disk management.

 

[Rod Speed]

Jon Danniken wrote

VanguardLH wrote

Hey Vanguard, thanks. I didn't realize that regular partitions would
be able to do this.

So, would I be able to do this with the "DiskManagement" application
that comes with WinXP?
Yes.

In other words, hook up the bare drive to my working system and just make three primary partitions, with the last one
being the one I want to end up at the slow part of the drive?

Yes.

Tho its easier to just clone the system partition first, that way you
dont have to reinstall XP and all the apps you have installed, and
redo you settings etc on the new install. You cant clone with XP itself.

Then do the manual creation of the other two partitions in
disk management and then copy the files from the original
drive into where you want them in the other two partitions.

 

[GMAN]

Hello! I bought a 1TB hard drive, and will be reinstalling Windows and such
into it. My current HDD is 500GB, of which I am using 350GB.

My normal course of action is to transfer the contents of the old hard drive
to the new drive, and keep the old hard drive disconnected, with it's data
left intact, as a backup.

So, like always, I will be making a 350GB file on the new drive, and filling
it with the contents of my old drive. However, because this data is more of
a backup than anything else, it will not be accessed frequently, and if
there is a "slow part" of the hard drive, I want to put this 350GB of data
in that part.

Is there a method to put this data in the "slow part" of the hard drive?
Will I need to do this with a partition at that space, and if so, what
freeware/shareware application would you suggest I use for this?

Thanks

Jon

Go here and get Ultimate Drefrag. It does this . You can tell it to put less
accessed data in the slower part of the drive.

Free 30 day trial can be downloaded so give it a try.


http://www.disktrix.com/


Been using it on my 3 machines for a few years now.

 

[Ed Light]

You can use BootIt Bare Metal, unregistered. You install it to a CD or
Thumb Drive, and go into maintenance without installing anything. In
Partition Work, you could create a new partition, NTFS, that was a size
that would leave 350G on the end of the drive. Then you would use the
icon on the bottom left, Imaging I think, to start Image for DOS. You
would use Copy to copy the 350G from the old drive to the end of the new
drive. Then you would delete the blank partition.

If the new drive uses the new tiny sector scheme then you'll need to
look at the FAQ on the website to get the settings to use so that it
aligns properly.

Pretty geeky, but powerful.

Their newsgroup will give you instant help.
--
Ed Light

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