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Short-Stroking WD Green

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Oh, ok so I would go into disk management, use the w8 partition wizard and create that size partition? So It would automatically select the faster part of the drive?

No no no, you have to use hd tune to find the capacity where the performance of the drive cuts off, then go into disk management and shrink the partition already there on the drive to the capacity that hd tune said was faster, then create a 2nd partition in the now empty space for the slower part of the drive so you still have the same capacity.

Hi, I've bought a 3TB Green drive, and I wanted to find out how to short stroke it. Yes I have watched the NCIX video on short stroking using the HD Tune Pro free 15 day trial, but the problem is that I downloaded and used the trial 6 months ago to short stroke my old hard drive. So I wanted to find out if there was another (free) application I could use (since I don't want to spend $40 on something I'll use once) or if I could even do it in windows 8.1.

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Try just normal HD Tune.

http://www.hdtune.com/download.html

Scroll down the page a little bit till you find it.

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if you unisntall it, and reinstall it, it should reset the trial.  i may be wrong

 

 

 

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if you unisntall it, and reinstall it, it should reset the trial.  i may be wrong

Yes I have tried that and it still doesn't work. Thx for suggestion though

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I have tried that and normal HD Tune does not have the short-stroking tool.

 

You don't need a tool to do it, you just have to find where the performance drops off with the drive, then go into disk manager and shrink the partition to the size of the fast part of the drive, then create another partition for the slower part of the drive.

Specs: CPU - Intel i7 8700K @ 5GHz | GPU - Gigabyte GTX 970 G1 Gaming | Motherboard - ASUS Strix Z370-G WIFI AC | RAM - XPG Gammix DDR4-3000MHz 32GB (2x16GB) | Main Drive - Samsung 850 Evo 500GB M.2 | Other Drives - 7TB/3 Drives | CPU Cooler - Corsair H100i Pro | Case - Fractal Design Define C Mini TG | Power Supply - EVGA G3 850W

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You don't need a tool to do it, you just have to find where the performance drops off with the drive, then go into disk manager and shrink the partition to the size of the fast part of the drive, then create another partition for the slower part of the drive.

Oh, ok so I would go into disk management, use the w8 partition wizard and create that size partition? So It would automatically select the faster part of the drive?

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Oh, ok so I would go into disk management, use the w8 partition wizard and create that size partition? So It would automatically select the faster part of the drive?

No no no, you have to use hd tune to find the capacity where the performance of the drive cuts off, then go into disk management and shrink the partition already there on the drive to the capacity that hd tune said was faster, then create a 2nd partition in the now empty space for the slower part of the drive so you still have the same capacity.

Specs: CPU - Intel i7 8700K @ 5GHz | GPU - Gigabyte GTX 970 G1 Gaming | Motherboard - ASUS Strix Z370-G WIFI AC | RAM - XPG Gammix DDR4-3000MHz 32GB (2x16GB) | Main Drive - Samsung 850 Evo 500GB M.2 | Other Drives - 7TB/3 Drives | CPU Cooler - Corsair H100i Pro | Case - Fractal Design Define C Mini TG | Power Supply - EVGA G3 850W

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No no no, you have to use hd tune to find the capacity where the performance of the drive cuts off, then go into disk management and shrink the partition already there on the drive to the capacity that hd tune said was faster, then create a 2nd partition in the now empty space for the slower part of the drive so you still have the same capacity.

So I would need to shrink the ORIGINAL partition of the drive, then fill in the rest of the drive with another partition? Sorry for being a noob, and thx for your help and patience.

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So I would need to shrink the ORIGINAL partition of the drive, then fill in the rest of the drive with another partition? Sorry for being a noob, and thx for your help and patience.

 

Yes.

Specs: CPU - Intel i7 8700K @ 5GHz | GPU - Gigabyte GTX 970 G1 Gaming | Motherboard - ASUS Strix Z370-G WIFI AC | RAM - XPG Gammix DDR4-3000MHz 32GB (2x16GB) | Main Drive - Samsung 850 Evo 500GB M.2 | Other Drives - 7TB/3 Drives | CPU Cooler - Corsair H100i Pro | Case - Fractal Design Define C Mini TG | Power Supply - EVGA G3 850W

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Hey sorry to bother you again, but I tried doing what you suggested then following this guide: http://www.pcworld.com/article/255224/how_to_partition_your_hard_drive_to_optimize_performance.html

But nothing seemed to happen when I tested it again in HD Tune.

I erased my original primary partition on the drive, allocated 768000mb (768gb), left the rest unallocated then ran the test again, but nothing changed.

When shortstroked min transfer speed: 94.2

Non shortstroked speed: 94.2

Can someone please tell me what I've been doing wrong? Thanks

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Shortstroking doesn't change the speed of the drive itself, it's just a method of placing your data on the faster section of the drive.

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OK, so I did it right but when i ran the benchmark it tested the entire drive, but the (primary) small partition contains the faster part right? How do I then test just the faster part of the drive?

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If you're using the trial of Pro there's a checkbox for Short Stroke and you can specify how big a section of the drive to test.

 

Like I said though, it doesn't change the performance at all. Short stroking is about making sure your data is confined to the faster section of the drive.

 

Here's a screenshot showing how this works:

 

DgNglnA.png

 

The short stroked partition is in red, so the data in there is confined to the faster section of the drive while the rest of the drive is set aside for less important data.

 

The performance of the drive itself doesn't change.

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If you're using the trial of Pro there's a checkbox for Short Stroke and you can specify how big a section of the drive to test.

 

Like I said though, it doesn't change the performance at all. Short stroking is about making sure your data is confined to the faster section of the drive.

 

Here's a screenshot showing how this works:

 

shortstroke.png

 

The short stroked partition is in red, so the data in there is confined to the faster section of the drive while the rest of the drive is set aside for less important data.

 

The performance of the drive itself doesn't change.

I know the performance doesn't change, if you read above you would know that I can't use the hd tune pro trial. The question is if I created a smaller primary partition in windows, would it partition just the outer part of the drive or do I need to do something else?
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I know it might be a crazy thing to um suggest... but um... how do I put this...

 

...pay

 

although I find shortstroking a green drive a bit useless. Maybe if you were using a velociraptor as a scratch disk, but green drives go to sleep all the time and are so slow. They are only good for storing content like movies, stolen software, porn and backups. Might as well be shortstroking a BD-ROM

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I know it might be a crazy thing to um suggest... but um... how do I put this...

 

...pay

 

although I find shortstroking a green drive a bit useless. Maybe if you were using a velociraptor as a scratch disk, but green drives go to sleep all the time and are so slow. They are only good for storing content like movies, stolen software, porn and backups. Might as well be shortstroking a BD-ROM

Fair enough. I just want to increase my bf4 loading times.
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I know the performance doesn't change, if you read above you would know that I can't use the hd tune pro trial. The question is if I created a smaller primary partition in windows, would it partition just the outer part of the drive or do I need to do something else?

 

Sorry, missed the part about the trial being expired.

 

Partitioning tools have the beginning of the drive on the left and the end of the drive on the right, same as HD Tune benchmarks. So if you use diskmgmt or whatever else to partition the drive like I have the boxes overlaid HD Tune the partitions would be on that section of the drive's performance curve.

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So if I create a primary partition and a secondary partition (primary being on the left) it will be shortstroked?

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So if I create a primary partition and a secondary partition (primary being on the left) it will be shortstroked?

 

Yes.

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