Working Around a Slow Laptop Hard Drive

As the owner of a Lenovo x41 tablet with a frustratingly slow 4200 rpm hard drive, the computing experience can be disappointing. Here are some tips, including maybe one or two that aren't obvious, to effectively workaround a slow laptop hard drive like mine. [Note: the links below are to how-to's for each step.]

  1. Max out your RAM-- this makes the biggest difference, and if you do so it is safer to...
  2. Disable the paging file-- this is a big disk operation that may not even be necessary for you
  3. Store frequently created files on a separate partition of your hard drive: Temp files [Control Panel-System-Advanced-Environment Variables], Mozilla Cache, Temporary Internet Files, Java Cache [Java Control Panel], Downloads folder, print spool folder-- this helps to keep your main partition defragmented, which is even better for...
  4. Smart Defragging by Layout.ini
  5. Remove software that does background I/O activity or monitoring (resident antivirus, antispyware, network scanning), if you can get away with it. (See this post for a security solution.)
  6. Disable the Indexing Service (this could probably go first!) [in services.msc]
  7. Disable Last Access timestamping of files
  8. Take advantage of your PC Card slot by getting the Delkin Cardbus UDMA CompactFlash adapter (Manufacturer Page / Amazon Product Page) and a UDMA CF card. My laptop's hard drive has a transfer rate of about 14 MB/sec, but a CF card in UDMA mode can sustain 40-45 MB/sec and far shorter access times.


More on using a UDMA CF card:

The 40 MB/sec transfer rate is impressive, but some aspects of the technology make it seem slow for frequent read/write operations. Storing a paging file or cache on it, for two examples, might not work very well. However, I have found the following do work well when put on a UDMA CF card:
  • Microsoft Outlook .OST file
  • Desktop Search Index (e.g. Copernic)
  • Firefox (not the profile(s), though)
  • Adobe Reader
     [You need a direct download so that you can specify the installation directory.]
  • Pidgin with GTK runtime (again, profile should probably be kept on your hard drive)
  • Other frequently used applications would probably also work well
This is just my casual observation, but indexes seem to perform well from a fast flash drive, but caches do not necessarily. Applications will start quickly from flash, since the reading is fast.
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