Budget Gaming CPU

[Dabombinable]

33 minutes ago, Pendragon said:

1) Get a boot drive ssd. Samsung 850 Evos are the some of the best in the market. https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-850-EVO-2-5-Inch-MZ-75E250B/dp/B00OAJ412U/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1468454321&sr=8-2&keywords=850+evo

2) Do a fresh install. Manually backup every document or anything you want to keep and reformat the disk the HDD and install windows on the ssd. 

3) Get 2x4 stick of ram that would match the speed, and the CL latency of the alienware one (this is a bit flaky at times), or just get 2x8 gb sticks of whatever ddr3

 

Step 2 is just to remove any possibility of infected processes or malware. Completely optional to skip formatting the HDD.

Although I have found out that after a while when a HDD starts to run slower than it should, a complete reformat (not a fast one) restores its original speed.

[Pendragon]

1 hour ago, Dabombinable said:

Although I have found out that after a while when a HDD starts to run slower than it should, a complete reformat (not a fast one) restores its original speed.

It's not the hard drive that's slowing down, its Windows. Other reasons for slowdown could be fragmentation hence there's a defrag tool built into Windows. Hard drives dont run slower over time. If yours is, please go back up your data cause its broken.

[Dabombinable]

44 minutes ago, Pendragon said:

It's not the hard drive that's slowing down, its Windows. Other reasons for slowdown could be fragmentation hence there's a defrag tool built into Windows. Hard drives dont run slower over time. If yours is, please go back up your data cause its broken.

The HDD slowing down in turn causes Windows to slow down. And despite running weekly defrags the HDD slows down over time due to files being deleted and Windows preferring to write to free space instead of overwriting deleted files.

[Pendragon]

 

3 hours ago, Dabombinable said:

The HDD slowing down in turn causes Windows to slow down. And despite running weekly defrags the HDD slows down over time due to files being deleted and Windows preferring to write to free space instead of overwriting deleted files.

Okay, lets start from the top. HDD don't slow down. They have a max rated RPM at which they are used to search for files on the platter. If yours can't operate at that RPM, your drive is just broken. Location of the data on the platter has significant impact on accessing speeds, but completely uncontrollable by the average end user at it's assigned by the file system normally NTFS or FAT32 for older computers. Basically the closer to the edge of the spindle, the faster the sequential access times. 

 

Secondly, weekly defrags are a waste of time in general. Defrag only helps sequential access time on files that are fragmented, because defrag as a concept overall relies on the largest contiguous block of free space available. What can occur is that you have a nicely defragged system with plenty of space leftover. Overtime, you'll fill this up until you have no blocks of free space left over, in which case downloading a large file will split the file across multiple blocks regardless of how defragged your system is. This doesn't slow down anything else in the drive has everything is already in its blocks. It only slows down access to this new downloaded large file spread across multiple blocks. Windows treated deleted files as "space that may be overwritten" and according to NTFS is treated as free space because the file system is dumb like that. Windows does prefer to write to free space and more importantly free blocks of space. But the HDD doesn't slow down because of this preference. The only time there would be perceived slowdown in the HDD is when its overwriting deleted files because it take time to remove the file from the disk. Defrag does not help at all in this regard. Only time that would help is a file shredder, that erases it from the disk. 

 

[Dabombinable]

3 hours ago, Pendragon said:

 

Okay, lets start from the top. HDD don't slow down. They have a max rated RPM at which they are used to search for files on the platter. If yours can't operate at that RPM, your drive is just broken. Location of the data on the platter has significant impact on accessing speeds, but completely uncontrollable by the average end user at it's assigned by the file system normally NTFS or FAT32 for older computers. Basically the closer to the edge of the spindle, the faster the sequential access times. 

 

Secondly, weekly defrags are a waste of time in general. Defrag only helps sequential access time on files that are fragmented, because defrag as a concept overall relies on the largest contiguous block of free space available. What can occur is that you have a nicely defragged system with plenty of space leftover. Overtime, you'll fill this up until you have no blocks of free space left over, in which case downloading a large file will split the file across multiple blocks regardless of how defragged your system is. This doesn't slow down anything else in the drive has everything is already in its blocks. It only slows down access to this new downloaded large file spread across multiple blocks. Windows treated deleted files as "space that may be overwritten" and according to NTFS is treated as free space because the file system is dumb like that. Windows does prefer to write to free space and more importantly free blocks of space. But the HDD doesn't slow down because of this preference. The only time there would be perceived slowdown in the HDD is when its overwriting deleted files because it take time to remove the file from the disk. Defrag does not help at all in this regard. Only time that would help is a file shredder, that erases it from the disk. 

 

Physically no, the RPM stays the same-I'm talking about the reads and writes, those slow down the more you move files to and from/delete from a HDD. I've had multiple HDD that went through several re-installs of Windows (XP-10), and occasionally re-purposed them as storage drives. The more use they got the slower the transfer rates, which were only resolved by a full reformat.