Is there anyway to improve HDD performance?

[Qacer]

My current motherboard only supports SATA rev1.0a. I have a Corsair 64GB SSD Nova Series as my primary storage connected to SATA port 1. For my secondary storage, I have a Samsung Spinpoint F4 HD204UI 2TB 5400 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s connected to SATA port 3.

I'm currently running Windows 7 and when I formatted the Samsung HDD I separated it into 3 partitions at 4k allocation unit size each. I didn't use Samsung Advanced Formatting tool and just stuck with whatever Windows 7 have. One partition is for temporary files and set to 10 GB. Another partition is set to 500 GB. The last partition is set to 1.3 TB and is meant for media / data files.

This is what I got when I ran CrystalDiskMark:

Corsair SSD

Samsung HDD

Is there a way to improve the HDD performance?

If not, is there a way to improve overall setup performance? Regarding setup performance, I'm referring to any tweaks in Win 7 that can optimize my system performance. For example, when I switch my Temporary Internet Files to the Samsung HDD Temp partition, it seemed that Internet Explorer 8 took a couple seconds to fully load CNN.com. I attempted to do the same thing in Google Chrome, and the page loaded quickly.

Thanks!

 

[postmortemIA]

Your problem is that you have reached maximum of SATA1 interface - 1.5Gbps and no NCQ (that SSD benefit from). so system needs complete overhaul more or less.

Do you have any PCI-e 1x ports? if you'd buy decent pci-e 1x SATA controller, you could get more out of your SSD.

Buy the way, adding partitions to conventional hard drive slows it down - disk head has to jump more than it would if files are stored adjacent to each other.

 

[tweakboy]

I agree grab a PCIexpress SATA II card. gl Your scores will go above 200mbps read and write. gl

 

[Qacer]

Your problem is that you have reached maximum of SATA1 interface - 1.5Gbps and no NCQ (that SSD benefit from). so system needs complete overhaul more or less.

Do you have any PCI-e 1x ports? if you'd buy decent pci-e 1x SATA controller, you could get more out of your SSD.

Buy the way, adding partitions to conventional hard drive slows it down - disk head has to jump more than it would if files are stored adjacent to each other.

I believe I have one extra PCI-e 1x port. For the SSD, I'm aware of the SATA 1 limitations, and since this system is old, I'm fine with the current performance. What I wanted to see if I could improve the HDD random 4K read and write.

I didn't realize that about the separate partitions. I always thought that separate partitions would yield a better performance. Thanks!

 

[fuzzymath10]

You can't improve the 4k random speeds for the hard drive. That's why you bought an SSD 😉

One of the points of the SSD is to eliminate crappy random performance.