- Mar 17, 2011
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I feel a little crazy here; but hear me out!
How often do you do it? Have you ever?
I've only done it a couple times in the years I've been playing with computers with Windows. I've usually just maintained clearing temporary files and invalid registry keys with CCleaner, but decided to go ahead and try a session of writing 0's for unused space to my boot drive (which is a WD VelociRaptor WD3000HLFS @~75% filled). The results were pretty noticeable with game load times and Windows booting to desktop. My observations are admittedly subjective, and I also performed a clean graphics driver update, so this may not have been the primary cause to the boost in performance I noticed. So I'm curious if there's any merit to this. As an aside, it may just be directly related to the firmware of the HDD in question and how their data maintenance is performed. Digression aside, it has me curious.
I looked for performance comparisons - or even mention of this being a useful maintenance task - and there doesn't seem to be much of this mentioned around the net. The only site I could find to really elaborate zero-filling is here. Not that this will be a growing issue but there's still a large portion of storage devices in use being good 'ole fashioned spindle (since SSDs are still advancing in becoming the preferred storage medium at more and more affordable prices). The obvious detriment here is if you, for whatever reason, need to recover deleted data; it won't be as easy. That's not the focus here though. I'm after improvements of user experience! Aren't we all? :awe:
I didn't think of it at the time, but I really should've benchmarked this to have some numbers. Does anyone have objective analysis of how writing 0's to unused space of a boot HDD can help its performance?
If this does help, it could be a very simple performance boost to revitalize those old HDDs.
I do have another HDD that's external (WD My Book 2TB) and is about 1/2 full. I'll try benchmarking this one to determine any benefits, but I'm not sure if it'll help prove/disprove what I'm after here.
I was thinking a good test would be the following:
1. After a fresh boot, run CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2f @1000MB with 5 passes on all 4 tests read/write
2. Reboot into Safe mode, Run CCleaner and clear temporary files (default) and registry
3. Reboot to normal OS and re-benchmark with Crystaldisk
4. Reboot to Safe mode and run CCleaner again; this time clearing temporary files (default), registry, and Write 0's to unused sectors
5. Reboot to normal OS and re-benchmark again with Crystaldisk
(Part of the problem with benchmarking to determine the level of effectiveness will be that a low-level overwrite goes hand-in-hand with clearing temporary files. Steps 2 & 3 may not be completely necessary, but to determine the efficacy of writing 0's versus simply clearing up more space, I thought it'd be helpful.)
This will indeed take a while for a 2TB spindle drive that's only ~50% full, and may not really show much improvement since it's only my media storage drive. I'll get to it sometime in the near future when I have the spare time to let the low-level writing session take place. Like I said, this'll probably be a lot more useful for a boot drive. It seemed it did for me, at least.
What do you think?
How often do you do it? Have you ever?
I've only done it a couple times in the years I've been playing with computers with Windows. I've usually just maintained clearing temporary files and invalid registry keys with CCleaner, but decided to go ahead and try a session of writing 0's for unused space to my boot drive (which is a WD VelociRaptor WD3000HLFS @~75% filled). The results were pretty noticeable with game load times and Windows booting to desktop. My observations are admittedly subjective, and I also performed a clean graphics driver update, so this may not have been the primary cause to the boost in performance I noticed. So I'm curious if there's any merit to this. As an aside, it may just be directly related to the firmware of the HDD in question and how their data maintenance is performed. Digression aside, it has me curious.
I looked for performance comparisons - or even mention of this being a useful maintenance task - and there doesn't seem to be much of this mentioned around the net. The only site I could find to really elaborate zero-filling is here. Not that this will be a growing issue but there's still a large portion of storage devices in use being good 'ole fashioned spindle (since SSDs are still advancing in becoming the preferred storage medium at more and more affordable prices). The obvious detriment here is if you, for whatever reason, need to recover deleted data; it won't be as easy. That's not the focus here though. I'm after improvements of user experience! Aren't we all? :awe:
I didn't think of it at the time, but I really should've benchmarked this to have some numbers. Does anyone have objective analysis of how writing 0's to unused space of a boot HDD can help its performance?
If this does help, it could be a very simple performance boost to revitalize those old HDDs.
I do have another HDD that's external (WD My Book 2TB) and is about 1/2 full. I'll try benchmarking this one to determine any benefits, but I'm not sure if it'll help prove/disprove what I'm after here.
I was thinking a good test would be the following:
1. After a fresh boot, run CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2f @1000MB with 5 passes on all 4 tests read/write
2. Reboot into Safe mode, Run CCleaner and clear temporary files (default) and registry
3. Reboot to normal OS and re-benchmark with Crystaldisk
4. Reboot to Safe mode and run CCleaner again; this time clearing temporary files (default), registry, and Write 0's to unused sectors
5. Reboot to normal OS and re-benchmark again with Crystaldisk
(Part of the problem with benchmarking to determine the level of effectiveness will be that a low-level overwrite goes hand-in-hand with clearing temporary files. Steps 2 & 3 may not be completely necessary, but to determine the efficacy of writing 0's versus simply clearing up more space, I thought it'd be helpful.)
This will indeed take a while for a 2TB spindle drive that's only ~50% full, and may not really show much improvement since it's only my media storage drive. I'll get to it sometime in the near future when I have the spare time to let the low-level writing session take place. Like I said, this'll probably be a lot more useful for a boot drive. It seemed it did for me, at least.
What do you think?