Speeding Up Hard Drives


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  Step 1:  Defining Hardware Speed

Open a Report
Hard drives are measured in milliseconds for access times to retrieve data. While milliseconds are fast as a blink, they are not nearly as fast as RAM's nanoseconds. Most hard drives now have a single digit access time, which means it take 9 milliseconds or less to access data on average. There are some things you can set to simulate a faster access time by designating some RAM to the hard drive cache.
  Step 2:  Accessing the Drive Settings

Open a Report
Right click My Computer and choose Properties. Click the Performance tab and then click the File System button.
  Step 3:  Setting the Computer Role

Open a Report
You can specify what type of computer this version of Windows is installed on. From the drop down list, choose Mobile or Docking System.
  Step 4:  Setting the Read-Ahead

Open a Report
To designate a percentage of RAM to serve as read-ahead cache slide the read-ahead optimization bar all the way over to Full. As you retrieve data from your slow hard disk a little extra gets thrown into your fast RAM. When that data is needed next it loads very quickly and then the next chunk of data is loaded into RAM. It's reading ahead of the data you need to give you the data faster.