“Measuring & improving

Drive performance”

 Overview:-
“The Need for speed”
 An important factor in measuring overall system
performance is the speed at which the computer’s disk
drive operate. Measure of drive performance generally are
applied to the computer’s hard disk but also can be applied
to other types of drives.
 These performance factors can be important when you are
buying a new computer or upgrading your current system.
You want to make sure that the drive uses an interface that
is compatible with any other devices you may add to the
computer.

“Average Access Time”

 i.) For a storage device, average time (or seek time) is the
amount of times the device to move its read or
read/write heads to any spot on the medium. It is
important that the measurement be an average because
access times can vary greatly, depending on how far
the heads need to move.

ii.) Average access time is an important measure of

performance for storage device and memory. Even though
memory chips have no moving read/write head .For storage
devices , access time are measured in milliseconds (ms), or
nanoseconds(ns), or one billionth of a second.

iii.) Access time depend on a combination of two factors:

the speed at which a disk spin (rpm) and the time it takes to
move the head from one track to another. The maximum access
time for diskettes is (0.2second or 200milisecond). The average
time is about one half the maximum, or (100miliseconds). Most
good drives work at rates of 6 to 12miliseconds many time faster
than diskette.

You should be able to find the specification for a device in its

packaging and documentation.
 “Example Of Average Access
Time”
a).Floppy Disk: 100 ms

b).Hard disk: 6 to 12 ms

c).High-performance hard disk: 4 or 5 ms

d).CD-ROM: 80 to 800 ms

e).Tape drives: slowest at a few seconds to a few minutes

“Data Transfer Rate”

The data transfer rate (DTR) is the amount of digital data that is
moved from one place to another in a given time. The data
transfer rate can be viewed as the speed of travel of a given
amount of data from one place to another. In general, the greater
the bandwidth of a given path, the higher the data transfer rate.

In telecommunications, data transfer is usually measured in bits

per second. For example, a typical low-speed connection to the
Internet may be 33.6 kilobits per second (Kbps).
On Ethernet local area networks, data transfer can be as fast as
10 megabits per second. Network switches are planned that will
transfer data in the terabit range. In earlier telecommunication
systems, data transfer was sometimes measured in characters or
blocks (of a certain size) per second. Data transfer time between
the microprocessor or RAM and devices such as the hard
disk and CD-ROM player is usually measured in milliseconds.

Units of data may be measured in bytes, KB, MB, or GB. Speed

for hard disk are generally high from about 15Mbps for low-end
home system to 80 Mbps.CD-ROMs are the slowest storage
devices. CD-ROMs range from 300KBps to 900KBps

“optimizing Disk Performance”

Over time, a PC’s performance can slow down. This is
especially true with older systems, but even PC,s can suffer from
occasional performance downturns. When a PC’s slows down in
this manner, some hard-disk maintenance may fix the problem.

“The best overall strategy to optimize performance

is to separate drives and devices based on speed and
function.”

“Ways to Optimize Disk performance”

 Delete temporary files.

 Uninstall little-used software programs.

 Run a disk scanner to look for and fix errors.
 Defragment the disk.

“Cleaning Up Unneeded Files”

If your system has been in use for a while (even just a few
months), hundreds of unneeded files may be cluttering up your
disc. Some of these files are meant to be stored only
temporarily, but windows does not always clean them out. If you
ever shut down your computer improperly windows does not
have chance to delete these files, and they still put until you
clean them out yourself. These files called temporary files.

Newer version of windows feature a built-in-utility called Disk

cleanup. Disk cleanup quickly find temporary files, and
remove them from disk. The process only takes few minutes
and can free hundreds of megabytes of wasted space on an
average hard disk.

clean install
A clean install is a software installation in which any previous
version is removed.

clean technology (clean tech)

Clean technology (clean tech) is a general term used to describe

products, processes or services that reduce waste and require as
few non-renewable resources as possible.
 “Scanning a Disk for Errors”

Another way to optimize disk performance is to scan the disk for

errors, fix the errors, and possible recover data that has been lost
or corrupted because of a disk error. A disk error can be a bad
spot on the disk’s physical surface, or it can be a piece of data
that cannot be accounted for in the FAT. Scanning the disk is
time consuming process, but if the disk has error, scanning may
be able to fix problems and improve performance.

“Defragmenting a Disk”

On the surface of magnetic disk, fragmentation occurs when a

file is stored in noncontiguous sectors on the disk’s surface. In
other words, pieces of files become scattered around in the disk.
As you create, modify, copy, and delete files(and install and
uninstall programs) over time, many files can become
fragmented. Windows features a built-in-defragmentation utility,
called Disk Defragmenter. You can use this utility or one of
several commercial utilities to ensure that your files are stored as
efficiently as possible on the disk.

“File or Data Compression”

Many users still find themselves pushing the limits of their

computer’s storage capacity. One solution to this storage
problem besides of upgrading to larger devices, is to compress
data.

“Data compression is the technology for

shrinking the size of a file so it takes up less space
on the disk”

 Compressing files will not necessarily improve a disk’s

performance; that is, compressing files will not reduce a
disk access time.

 Entire hard disks, floppy disk, or individual files can be

compressed by as much as a 3:1 ratio(so that 300 MB of
data fill only 100 MB of space, for instance).
 “File compression software”

PKZIP and WinZip: Windows-based PC’s

Stuff IT: Macintosh

 When you use a utility like WinZip, the program actually

shrinks the selected files and then saves them together
inside a new file, with it’s own name.
 Utilities such as WinZip, PKZIP, and Stuff IT generally
are not used to compress the contents of an entire hard
disk. Because such files must be expanded manually.
 Windows XP include its own utility for compressing
disk’s.

“Hard Disk Compression Software”

DriveSpace.

“Drive-Interface Standards”
 Hard disk drives are accessed over one of a number
of bus types, including parallel ATA (PATA, also called
IDE or EIDE; described before the introduction of SATA
as ATA), Serial ATA (SATA), SCSI, Serial Attached
SCSI (SAS), and Fiber Channel. Bridge circuitry is
sometimes used to connect hard disk drives to buses with
which they cannot communicate natively, such
as IEEE 1394, USB, SCSI and Thunderbolt.

Acronym or
Meaning Description
abbreviation

Bit serial data interface introduced by CDC

Storage Module
SMD Standard interface for many mini-computers in the 1970s and
Device
1980s.

Shugart Word serial interface introduced by Shugart Associates circa

Associates 1978;
SASI
System Evolved by ANSI into SCSI (SASI is a compatible subset of the
Interface first version of SCSI).

Bit serial data interfaces introduced by Seagate

ST-506
Technology beginning 1980.
ST-412
Standard interfaces for most small HDDs in the 1980s and early
ST-412RLL
1990s.

Small Word serial interface sponsored by ANSI and introduced in mid

SCSI
Computer 1980s;
System Standard interfaces for most enterprise HDDs in this century;
 Interface superseded by SAS

Bit serial data interface sponsored by ANSI and first introduced

Enhanced
by Maxtor in late 1980s.
ESDI Small Disk
A higher data rate follow on to the ST-506 family into the mid-
Interface
1990s, superseded by SCSI

Word serial interface introduced in late 1980s by Conner

(Parallel) AT Peripherals, later sponsored by ANSI; successor to ST-
(P)ATA
Attachment 412/506/ESDI. Standard HDD interface on all but enterprise
HDDs until superseded by SATA

Bit serial interface successor to PATA sponsored by ANSI and

SATA Serial ATA introduced in 2003.
Most common interface for all but enterprise HDDs.

Bit serial interface successor to SCSI sponsored by ANSI and

Serial Attached
SAS introduced in 2004.
SCSI
Most common interface for enterprise HDDs.

“ USB and FireWire”

All the peripheral devices can be attached to a computer through

a USB or FireWire ports, including storage devices. Although
USB and FireWire are not considered to be drive interfaces
(they support many types of devices), they support high data
transfer rates and provide connections that allows the host
computer to control an external storage devices.

This means you can simply purchase additional hard drives as

you need them and connect to your PC via a USB or FireWire
connection.

………….THE END……….......
Topic:-
Measuring& Improving Drive Performance
Subject:-
Introduction to Computers
Submitted to:-
Mam Munaza
Submitted by:-
M.Nazam ,Abdul sami, Mubashir
Hassan, Mubashir ali, Saqib Riaz
Roll #:-
1006,1050,1030,1012, 1044
Date:-
18Dec2019

Gc University (sahiwal campus)