How can I make my disks faster?

Hi, Thomas:

First, how do you know the hard drive is hitting 100% utilization? Have you tried the usual things like degragmenting your drive?

Osprey,

I'm running the O&O DiskStat gadget which shows me the disk activity...

And yes, as mentioned, I defrag'ed all my disks (with OO defrag).

Thomas

Sorry, never heard of it. Ok, a few more basic questions.

1. Are you running your hard drives in a RAID configuration?

2. Have you tried benchmarking your drives with a utility like Sisoft Sandra?

Is the Dimension E521 a desktop or a laptop system?

What OS are you using?

It *could* just be the OS constantly cacheing files - i.e. your swap file?

Is it actually slowing your system down, or are you just trying to find out what's causing it?

Re your question about SATA II drives:  I don't know if they'd help or not (they likely won't if the OS is to blame), but yes... you could use SATA II drives.

SATA is backwards compatable :emotion-5:

If you add SATA II drives on a SATA I system the drives will run at SATA I. Either you need bigger drives, more memory or switch to a RAID setup. Bigger drives is good, more ram is always good and RAID while fast does carry data loss risk.

Guys, thanx for all your answers.

I'll give the answers to all your questions first:

- no, I'm not using RAID

- yes, I tried Sisoft Sandra, but it doesn't help me a lot, I'm not quite sure what it tells me...

- the E521 is a desktop

- I'm using Vista Business x64

- my system is actually slowing down due to the 100% disk utilization and hence I would like to know what the reason for this excessive disk utilization is

And now here are some more new questions from me:

- adding SATA-II disks to my system doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, since I would loose the performance advantage, right?

- why does RAID "carry the risk of data loss"?

- why is it faster?

Thanx,

Thomas