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How can you decrease Hard Drive access?

post #1 of 11
7/13/05 at 4:52pm
Thread Starter 
Is it possible to reduce the OS accessing the Hard Drive? Like having as much as possible run off of RAM, etc? How would you do it?
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post #2 of 11
7/13/05 at 5:27pm
Why?
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post #3 of 11
7/13/05 at 5:39pm
Thread Starter 
Well, I keep on thinking of getting a W3V, but apparently the Hard Drive spinning can make the right palm rest very very hot (~90 F hot). So I was thinking that maybe if it was possible to get as much as possible to run off of the RAM instead there wouldn't be so much HD access, and then it wouldn't get so hot. Does that make sense?
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post #4 of 11
7/13/05 at 5:41pm
I assume that just having loads of RAM and reducing the page file size would do that.
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post #5 of 11
7/13/05 at 5:47pm
Thread Starter 
Ok. Loads of RAM I can get, but what is reducing the page file size?
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post #6 of 11
7/13/05 at 5:54pm
Ok here is what I did. My hard drive doesn't get hot but I don't like access noise nonetheless and therefore I got 2 gigs of RAM. Follow this:

1. Right click My Computer.
2. Click Properties
3. Click Advanced tab, then Settings button under Performance
4. Click advanced tab, then the change button under virtual memory
5. Click the no paging file dial and click set button. Click OK.
6. Restart

Your computer should rarely access your hard drive no and everything will be resident in RAM. Reduces hard drive access significantly unless your playing around with files and scanning.
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post #7 of 11
7/13/05 at 6:01pm
^ What he said, except if you disable the paging file, you may have problems with certain games, mainly the newer ones. I think BF2 requires a paging file for example.
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post #8 of 11
7/13/05 at 6:07pm
There are tweak tools that will let you increase the system ram dedicated to HD buffer.

Should be some DMA setting.. forgot where to look. Just google it.
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post #9 of 11
7/13/05 at 7:17pm
Windows and applications may expect a paging file too, so there can be problems with eliminating a paging file completely. I've done it before and things seemed to more or less work, but I never saw a noticeable improvement.

If you have enough memory to do what needs to be done, then the paging file shouldn't get used anyway. If you don't have enough memory or you have an application that requires a swap file, you're going to want to have it be available.

Having a decent amount of memory will help reduce hard drive usage, but its going to be hard to eliminate it. Many/most apps don't preload everything they need to run when they start, they just go get it when/if they need it off the hard drive.
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post #10 of 11
7/14/05 at 6:01am
Right about the lack of preloading, although Windows XP does try to guess what can be pre-fetched for a number of applications. The big problem that doesn't have a fix is that there are a number of core Windows services (i.e., you cannot disable them) that write to log files and such, every few seconds. The other problem is that the Windows filesystem cache doesn't cache writes for longer than about 1 second. So you will always have a tiny amount of disk activity, even on a totally idle system. It would be great if there was a tweak to force Windows to delay writes for longer (at least 30 seconds would be needed, to be of any real benefit) but I've never seen any such tweak. So even though I have 2GB of RAM and my filesystem cache has grown to 300MB I still see a lot of disk accesses. Damned annoying...
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post #11 of 11
7/14/05 at 1:22pm
Thread Starter 
Okay guys. Thanks for the help!
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