Introduction to Computers Optimizing Storage

Hardware Upgrades When choosing storage devices to upgrade we need to be aware of how to pick a faster hard drive than what we have now When looking at hard drive specs, the property that has the most impact on hard disk performance is going to be its RPMs 5,400 is considered very slow, 7,200 is average and 10,000 is considered fast Note that this is for hard disks only. SSD drives will state their transfer speeds instead The other thing we’d look at is the interface. SATA transfers 150 megabytes per second, SATA2 at 300, and SATA3 at 600 megabytes per second. This is a drastic difference

Disk Cleanup The fuller a disk becomes, the less efficient it is This is because there is less free space for the hard drive to work with, and because there is more data to sort through This slows down both write speeds as it is harder to find empty space to write the file, and read speeds since there are more files to look through Cleaning out unnecessary files off of a hard drive can improve a hard drive’s performance This tends not to be a huge performance issue with modern computers, but it can impact performance

Files to Delete For Disk Cleanup There are a lot of file types to get rid of (either manually or through disc cleanup) to regain space The first, and sometimes largest segment, is media that you haven’t accessed in a long time, or don’t plan to access for a long time. If you haven’t played a certain game, watched a certain movie or listened to a certain song in a long time, you can either archive it onto a disc or external hard drive, or delete it to regain space Your web browser uses caching to make itself faster. This means that it stores information such as the website, graphics, articles and such on the hard drive to load it faster. While each individual website won’t store a lot of data, together it can all add up

More Files to Delete For Disc Cleanup When you delete a file in Windows it goes into a separate folder called recycle bin, so that you can recover it if you need to. If you’ve deleted a large number of files, you’ll need to go in and empty your recycle bin to regain that space There are also temporary files created by the system to assist in certain tasks. For example temporary files may be left over after a software installation. It is rare these need to be kept, so we can almost always get rid of them to regain space

How to Run Disc Cleanup Disc Cleanup is designed to be very user friendly while providing as much information as you might need You choose what disc to cleanup, then which category of files you’d like to delete Disc Cleanup will show you how much space you’ll gain per category and overall

Fragmentation When you save files to the hard drive, the file may not always get saved in one contiguous space The file may have to divide the file into chunks and place the file into small empty spaces This is called fragmentation, and it allows us to more efficiently use our storage space

Defragmentation However if a hard drive is too fragmented, it will lead to slow read times, as it becomes more time consuming to piece together files, and it will slow write times as the hard drive will be splitting up files into smaller and more numerous chunks Fortunately, we can defragment the hard drive, and put the files back together This will shorten read times since files are together, and write times are shorter since the empty space will all be together, leading to less fragmentation needing to be done when writing

Error checking - Lost Clusters The last disc optimization technique we’ll talk about is error checking Error checking looks for and fixes two types of problems - Lost Clusters These are clusters of data created from fragmentation that are not claimed by any files These clusters could belong to files still on the system that had an error and lost their connection to this cluster, or they belong to a file that was deleted and the cluster accidentally wasn’t Error checking in Windows will identify these clusters and attempt to reconnect them with a file. If the system is unable to do so, it will assign a filename to theses clusters so that the user can access them and decide what to do with them If they contain data such as part of a text file, they may be recoverable, but if they are part of an image, or a binary data file, recovery is unlikely

Error Checking - Cross-Linked Files The other issue the error checking utility will look for is cross-linked files Cross-linked files occur when two or more files all claim the same cluster This would be an issue because if you tried to move, change or delete the data in the clusters from one file, it would affect the other The error checking tool will try to resolve this by figuring out which file the errant clusters actually belong to, and disconnect the clusters from the other file

How Often to Optimize? Hardware optimization shouldn’t happen very often. It can be expensive to upgrade your disk drives often, and once you have bought good hardware, there isn’t much else you can do Software optimization should happen fairly often, about once a week or so for high use machines Every time the storage is optimized, the user will not see a large difference, but keeping the storage optimized will work as preventative maintenance Also, if you don’t optimize often enough, the optimization process will take a long time to run, but if you perform it often, there will be less problems to fix, so it will be quick You can even schedule the optimization to run automatically when the computer is not in use to prevent interrupting the work flow