HDD Short-stroke help

itachipirate · November 24, 2015

Hey forumers! I'm looking to short-stroke my hard drive. I have a 500gb boot device, and two 250gb storage hard drives (set to one combined, non-striped partition in Windows.) I want to know if there's any way I can short stroke my 500gb drive to get better load times, since sometimes in Fallout 4 I get load times of ~50sec or more which is painfully annoying. Thanks guys! Suggestions are welcome, I don't care how i do it I just want shorter load times for Fallout haha

Captain_WD · November 25, 2015

~snip~

Hey there itachipirate,

I wouldn't rely much on short stroking for significant performance improvement. It does provide some speed increase but not significant and you lose a lot of storage space on the drive (about 70%). Here's a video of Linus showing you how it's done:

Feel free to ask if you have other questions

Captain_WD.

itachipirate · November 25, 2015

Hey there itachipirate,

I wouldn't rely much on short stroking for significant performance improvement. It does provide some speed increase but not significant and you lose a lot of storage space on the drive (about 70%). Here's a video of Linus showing you how it's done:

Feel free to ask if you have other questions

Captain_WD.

I watched this same video before posting This video is a little bit too general to use it as a step-by-step tutorial. I know there is a method for short-stroking that makes you lose storage space, but in the video Linus talks about simply making two partitions. One "faster" partition near the outside of the platter, and the other partition the slower portions towards the inside of the platter. I wanted to know if I could create a slow and fast partition without losing data currently on the drive, or maximum data storage space

Captain_WD · December 1, 2015

~snip~

Hey again

Apologies for the late response, I was off for a few days *caughbattlefrontcaugh* ^^

Theoretically, you can. As Linus shows in the video, you can find where the drive's speed starts to decline and cut out the first partition there (at the capacity mark). This should give you a fast partition. The rest is simply left as unallocated space which you can allocate into one or more partitions as you wish. A real world problem would be that if you do have a second partition beyond that speed-declining mark the computer might need to access or address that partition every once in a while for one reason or another and this will cause the actuator to hover further down the drive, slowing down the drive's speed. This is why it is recommended to have only one partition if you want to see the effect of short-stroking your drive. Again this is something that I don't really recommend and there isn't much speed increase anyway.

Captain_WD.