Just curious if anybody has played with their HDD's allocation unit size. Has anybody noticed a speed difference by bumping it up to 64k? How much?
If a drive/partition only housed very large files of which will often be transfered(rather than just accessed), a larger Allocation Unit (or cluster) size could help a little bit. But with mixed files you'll just be wasting space when deviating much from the default.
Get an SSD for any situation where drive performance really matters. :-)
Pretty much what I figured. Unfortunately I can't really afford an SSD at the sort of capacity I would need at the moment.
Good thing it's an area of technology where great strides are made every year. Keep your target fixed on getting an SSD as soon as you find a model that suits you. There will be one.
Just look up your mobo and see if it supports SSD caching, if it does get a cheap 120 GB SSD and be amazed by a 2TB Drive with 80% of the performance of a regular SSD. Could be a good way to save some money, sadly SSD caching isn't supported by many motherboards.