The checkbox that saves you hours

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Hi,

Being a geek is expensive, even if you work at Microsoft. You always want to test, assess, and use the latest concepts and technologies. So hardware budget, and personal time consumption is very high.

Being a real one (even if my budget is always too short), I recently changed my Home PC for a blasting rig.

When you launch yourself in the assembly, setup, etc. … of a new machine, you arrive to a backup/restore/transfer data step.

As most of us have now hundreds GB of data, this can take a while before it’s done.

On my new PC, I use few Western Digital Velociraptors, few 1.5 TB Seagate Disks, 1 Adaptec high-end RAID card (to outperform the Intel ICH10R and Marvell SAS controller of my motherboard) and various arrays with stripe (Raid 0) and stripe+mirroring (Raid 10)

You can expect some good transfer rates from this, can’t you?

While transferring back data between a stripe array to another, I was very surprised on my rate transfer performances (using Windows Vista x64 Utlimate en-us with 6 GB of RAM):

9,8 MB/s what a crappy transfer rate ! ….. (btw I use TeraCopy here to speed up data transfer)

I then remembered my few trainings, certifications, and tweaking on Vista/Windows Server 2008. I decided to check an obvious setting for the Hard Disks Drives.

Here’s how to check and eventually set it right:

  • Right Click on “Computer” icon and choose “Manage” (There’s various ways to arrive to the next screen, that’s one of them)

  • Select “Disk Management” tree

  • In the Central Window, Select your disks set and right click on the Volume based on Hard Disks Drives and select “Properties”

  • On the displayed Windows Form, select the “Policies” tab, and check the checkboxes I highlighted in red (in my case, they were not checked)

  • Then enjoy the real speed of your disks or arrays :

 

  • 101 MB/s transfer rate now !

At this rate, the transfer time for 500 GB (which are all my family DVs rushes I didn’t edit yet) drop from 10 hours to less than 1 hour…..:-) … 9 hours of useless machine time saved.

That’s what I call saving hours …. not talking of the overall performances your machine deliver with this little checkbox.

Enjoy

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