5.8.1 Storage Optimization

Learn how to optimize storage spaces.

The goal of optimization is to make the storage devices work as fast as possible. There are several things you can do to optimize your storage devices. Depending on how much you use your storage devices, you could get away with using these optimization techniques weekly or even monthly, but all that matters is that you're optimizing your storage disks regularly.

Upgrade the Hard Disk

The first thing you can do to optimize is to simply upgrade. Replacing your storage devices is the latest and greatest storage devices will undoubtedly boost performance. Make sure to look out for the RPM of the hard drive.

• 5400 (slowest)
• 7200 (standard)
• 10,000
• 15,000 (premium) ew Remember, the best performance will always come from hard drives that don't use moving parts, like SSDs and M.2s.

Upgrade the Disk Interface

By using a fast disk interface, you can increase the I/O speeds of the disk. The slowest SATA standard has a data transfer speed of 150 MB/s. The fastest, SATA 3.0, has a data transfer speed of 600 MB/s, a 4x upgrade. If you desire true speed, consider upgrading to PCIe for speeds up to 4000 MB/s. By using both disk with the fastest rotational speed and and using them with the fastest interfaces, you can squeeze peak performance out of your storage devices.

Disk Cleanup Utility

The more things there are saved on a storage disk, the longer it'll take to retrieve and saves files to it, since it has to continually search among the used space for the fragments of a file to reconstruct and use it. By keeping your disks as empty as possible, it's performance will remain at high levels.

Microsoft-Windows has the Disk Cleanup Utility that does exactly this for you. It scans the hard drive for unused or unnecessary files saved on the hard drive, and deletes them. Those files, sometimes referred to as temporary files, might include:

• installation executables
• files in the Recycle Bin
• installation log files
• cached web pages
• cached images

Defragmentation

When saving a file, the OS searches for empty space on the storage disk, divides that empty space into sections, then assigns portions of the file to be saved in those empty sections. This process is called fragmentation. Fragmentation is used to efficiently use the empty space on hard drives. However, the more files that are being saved and recalled by the disk, the worse the fragmentation of the files get. The storage disk will have to hunt across the entire disk, searching for the missing fragments of the file you wanted, decreasing performance.

Windows also has a utility to defragment files saved on the hard drive. Defragmentation involves moving and rewriting file fragments to contiguous sectors on the hard drive, to increase the file access and retrieval speeds. To manually run this utility using CMD or PowerShell, run the defrag command to place files in contiguous order on a disk.

Error Checking

Windows also has an error checking utility that scans for mishaps that might've happened in a storage disk. You can run it by opening CMD or PowerShell with the chkdsk command. It checks for these things:

• lost clusters
• cross-linked files
• orphaned files
• bad sectors

Lost Clusters

Lost clusters are a series of clusters on the hard disk that aren't claimed by a saved file. There is data in those clusters, but they aren't assigned to a specific file that can be accessed or retrieved by the OS. The Windows Error Checker will search for and identify both the lost clusters and the file they really belong to. If it can't find a valid parent file, depending on the type of data the lost cluster contains, it'll save the lost cluster and ask the end user to determine where it belongs or simply erase it.

Cross-Linked Files

Cross-linked files arise when two files try to claim the same storage disk sectors. The Windows Error Checker will try to detect what file the disputed clusters actually belong to.

Orphaned Files

These are files exist on the hard drive but don't have a pointer associated to them in the OS. The Windows Check Disk utility will restore the pointer, assigning the file to a directory.

Bad Sector

Bad sectors are portions of the hard disk that have errors, rendering them unusable.

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