3 ms·

Wasn't part of the motivation for moving to 2.5" seek time? The arm has a shorter distance to travel? I heard about a hack I never tried, myself, where you buy

Wasn't part of the motivation for moving to 2.5" seek time? The arm has a shorter distance to travel? I heard about a hack I never tried, myself, where you buy an oversized hard drive and only use the beginning of it. Hard drives store data from the outside in, so you can improve latency by minimizing arm travel, and improve throughput by storing data where the linear velocity is faster. No idea how big of a difference this would make.

thecal 5y ago
That's called short-stroking - https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157...
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  Chuckles
louwrentius 5y ago
Yes, short-stroking - as it is called - was indeed a trick to get better performance out of a hard drive. However, latency is about both the latency of the arm movement and the rotational latency. The latter you can't overcome by short-stroking. However, short-stroking does point to an interesting problem when hard drives were still relevant. If you didn't size your storage right, you ran out of IOPs long before you ran out of capacity. For instance, if you run VMs on your SAN / storage array, you may have to stop putting VMs on the storage long before capacity is reached.
p_l 5y ago
Move to 2.5" was mostly about drive slot density, not speed, as for some time it was easier to reach high speed in bigger package.
- Macha 5y ago
  Specifically for the velociraptor drives however, it was a 2.5" form factor drive that needed to be mounted in a 3.5" form factor heatsink, so you weren't gaining anything in drive density.
qball 5y ago
>I heard about a hack I never tried, myself, where you buy an oversized hard drive and only use the beginning of it. It's actually kind of funny that "just using the beginning 25%" of the drive is completely unnecessary provided you've got your partitions set up properly- you just create a partition at the beginning of the disk that has the data you want to access the quickest, and use the end of the disk for data that you don't access coincident with the data you want to get the fastest (a perfect place to put a dual-booted Linux install, for instance).
- bombcar 5y ago
  The problem is if you use the other 75% _at all_ in normal use it slows the 25%. A separate operating system would work well though.

thecal 5y ago

That's called short-stroking - https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157...

ChuckNorris89 5y ago
Chuckles

louwrentius 5y ago

Yes, short-stroking - as it is called - was indeed a trick to get better performance out of a hard drive. However, latency is about both the latency of the arm movement and the rotational latency. The latter you can't overcome by short-stroking. However, short-stroking does point to an interesting problem when hard drives were still relevant. If you didn't size your storage right, you ran out of IOPs long before you ran out of capacity. For instance, if you run VMs on your SAN / storage array, you may have to stop putting VMs on the storage long before capacity is reached.

p_l 5y ago

Move to 2.5" was mostly about drive slot density, not speed, as for some time it was easier to reach high speed in bigger package.

Macha 5y ago
Specifically for the velociraptor drives however, it was a 2.5" form factor drive that needed to be mounted in a 3.5" form factor heatsink, so you weren't gaining anything in drive density.

qball 5y ago

>I heard about a hack I never tried, myself, where you buy an oversized hard drive and only use the beginning of it. It's actually kind of funny that "just using the beginning 25%" of the drive is completely unnecessary provided you've got your partitions set up properly- you just create a partition at the beginning of the disk that has the data you want to access the quickest, and use the end of the disk for data that you don't access coincident with the data you want to get the fastest (a perfect place to put a dual-booted Linux install, for instance).

bombcar 5y ago
The problem is if you use the other 75% _at all_ in normal use it slows the 25%. A separate operating system would work well though.