Partial stroking harddrives is nothing new; it's been done for decades.
Also, you don't need to actually change drive capacity, or partition a drive to see these kind of benefits. If you keep your drive defragmented, you get nearly identical benefits. The read write heads are only going to were data is, so if you keep all of your frequently used data near the front of the drive, your access times improve quite a bit.
Actually, the only benefit of short/partial stroking that you cannot see through simple drive maintinance are purely synthetic benchmarks.
Anyway, this brings up another reason why drives such as raptors are grossly overrated. Their only consitent advantage is access time, but that advantage narrows quite a bit when you realize that any drive with higher platter densitity than the raptors has to move it's heads a far shorter distance to get at the same amount of data.
Personally, I use JKDefrag to move all my rarely used data to the end of my drives, then I exclude those directories from the normal deframentation passes. That way, the front of my drives with all my frequently used data has access times that are limited mostly by the rotational latency of 7200rpm. Same benefits as partial stroking, no downside, and can be done without having to resize, repartion, or reformat.
Also, you don't need to actually change drive capacity, or partition a drive to see these kind of benefits. If you keep your drive defragmented, you get nearly identical benefits. The read write heads are only going to were data is, so if you keep all of your frequently used data near the front of the drive, your access times improve quite a bit.
Actually, the only benefit of short/partial stroking that you cannot see through simple drive maintinance are purely synthetic benchmarks.
Anyway, this brings up another reason why drives such as raptors are grossly overrated. Their only consitent advantage is access time, but that advantage narrows quite a bit when you realize that any drive with higher platter densitity than the raptors has to move it's heads a far shorter distance to get at the same amount of data.
Personally, I use JKDefrag to move all my rarely used data to the end of my drives, then I exclude those directories from the normal deframentation passes. That way, the front of my drives with all my frequently used data has access times that are limited mostly by the rotational latency of 7200rpm. Same benefits as partial stroking, no downside, and can be done without having to resize, repartion, or reformat.
