A report on Measuring and Improving Drive Performance.

Course Title: Computer Fundamentals & IT Course Code: CSE-101

Submitted To: Md. Mezbaul Islam

Lecturer of Green university Dept. of CSE, gub

Submitted by:Group-8
Members Name: 1.Md.Golam Sarwar, ID:120103019 2.Md.Asaduzzaman, ID:120103028 3.Md.Murad Hossain, ID:120103041

Date of submission: 29-07-2013

An average access time

An average access time of 8.0 ms (including seek time and rotational latency) is slightly better than the numbers we measured for predecessors. All the 7,200 RPM drives are clearly slower, which can be noticed every time a large number of small files is to be loaded, such as Photoshop with lots of plugins for example. A disadvantage, though, clearly is the access noise that is caused by the rapid movements of the read/write heads. At the same time, the spinning noise of the drive is very acceptable, and won't be very noticeable when mixed with the noise that is generated by your power supply, processor and graphics chip fans. Access time is also frequently used to describe the speed of disk drives. Disk access times are measured in milliseconds (thousandths of a second), often abbreviated as ms. Fast hard disk drives for personal computers boast access times of about 9 to 15 milliseconds. Note that this is about 200 times slower than average DRAM. (dynamic random access memory)

Data Transfer Rate:

The speed with which data can be transmitted from one device to another. Data rates are often measured in megabits (million bits) or megabytes (million bytes) per second. These are usually abbreviated as Mbps and MBps, respectively.

Optimization of Disk Performance:

Optimizing the performance of a computer system via hardware tuning and/or adjusting some operating system-related settings either directly or using a piece of computer system optimization software. e.g., using disk defragmentation software. Disk optimization is a process in which the physical locations of files on a volume are "streamlined." Files and metadata are re-arranged in order to improve data access times and minimize time moving a hard drive's head. Files can become "fragmented" over time as they are changed and saved and as the volume is filled, with different parts of a single file stored in different locations on a volume. The process of collecting file fragments and putting them "back together" is known as optimization. However, if a failure occurs during optimization, such as power loss, files could become damaged and need to be restored from a backup copy.

THE BENEFITS OF DEFRAGMENTING:

Firstly, If we Have huge or more files on computer like pictures, word documents, videos, etc. This is partly because of how magnetic hard drives work, and partly because of how the Windows File System works. Magnetic hard drives have moving parts in them. The platters, or discs, where information is stored are constantly spinning, and a metal arm controlled by an actuator moves across the platters. At the end of the arm is a read/write head. The read/write head reads data from hard drive back to operating system, and it also writes data from operating system back to the hard drive. These moving parts inside a hard drive limit its possible speed. Data can only be accessed at the speed the platters rotate, and the speed the arm moves the read/write head to access data. Secondly, cause is the Windows File System. When you delete files and programs, they are not really deleted from the disc. What is actually deleted is a pointer in the file system which tells Windows where your file is located on the hard drive. Once that pointer is deleted, then as far as Windows is concerned, the file no longer exists. So the next time Windows wants to write more files to the hard drive, it will consider the space occupied by that file as empty, and may write new information over it. This can lead to parts of files being written to separate areas on hard drive. When the file is written to random areas all over hard drive, then it increases the time it takes Windows to access the file. This is because the read/write head must be moved to several places on the hard drive before the entire file can be accessed.

File Compression:
File compression is used to reduce the file size of one or more files. When a file or a group of files is compressed, the resulting "archive" often takes up 50% to 90% less disk space than the original file(s). Common types of file compression include Zip, Gzip, RAR, StuffIt, and 7z compression. Each one of these compression methods uses a unique algorithm to compress the data. For data transmission, compression can be performed on just the data content or on the entire transmission unit (including header data) depending on a number of factors.file extensions like, .ZIP, .GZ, .RAR, .SITX, .7Z.

ADVANTAGES OF DATA COMPRESSION:

Less disk space (more data in reality) writing and reading Faster file transfer Variable dynamic range Byte order independent

* To obtain these advantages the compression and decompression must be carried out directly by writing and reading programs.

DISADVANTAGES OF DATA COMPRESSION:

Added complication Effect of errors in transmission Slower for sophisticated methods (but simple methods can be faster for writing to disk.) ``Unknown'' byte / pixel relationship (+) Need to decompress all previous data (+) + Stripping, or tiling, or look-up tables can partially overcome these problems