The Low Down

There is no denying that short stroking improves the hard disk drive's performance, particularly when it comes to random accesses. In fact, its primary purpose is to reduce the random seek time. It also has the side effect of improving sequential transfer rates, but only because short stroking inevitably places frequently-accessed data on the hard disk drive's fastest tracks. However, short stroking isn't as miraculous as some people would like you to think.

Frankly speaking, most of us have been short stroking our hard disk drives for ages without even realizing it. If you defragment your hard disk drives on a regular basis, or have disk defragmentation software running in the background, you are already short stroking your drives. If you partitioned your hard disk drives, and followed the age-old wisdom of placing the most frequently-accessed data in the first partition of each drive, then you have also been short stroking your drives.

Although purists might argue otherwise, short stroking happens if frequently-accessed data is placed close together for quicker access. It doesn't matter whether you use the LBA, partitioning or defragmenting method - as long as the frequently-accessed data are spatially close to each other, the drive heads will never have to move far. That is what short stroking is about.

Therefore, if you are already using partitions or defragmentation software, or both methods, to optimize your data accesses, you are already set as far as short stroking is concerned. Using the LBA mod is not going to improve your hard disk drive's performance beyond what you have already done.

If you have not done any partitioning, or (horror!) never defragmented your hard disk drive, then you should consider doing some short stroking. You do not have to do it for all your drives. The most important thing is to optimize the partition that contains your most frequently-accessed files - that usually means the operating system and application files, as well as your work files.

You will have three choices - using the LBA Mod, partitioning the drive, or defragmenting it. Of course, you can also combine them, but let's concentrate on the advantages and disadvantages of the individual methods. For your convenience, we summarized them in the table below.

We personally feel that partitioning offers the best bang for your buck. It's easy to do, with no real disadvantages. You can combine it with disk defragmentation to further improve the short stroke optimization.

If you do not wish to repartition your hard disk drive, you can opt to defragment your hard disk drive on a regular basis. This is a hassle you will have to put up with, but it's one that can be mitigated by either using a disk defragmentation software that runs in the background, or manually defragmenting the drive while you are sleeping.

The LBA mod is, honestly, pointless to use. The only reasons we can think of doing it would be to earn the bragging rights, or to defraud others into thinking that the modded drive is some other drive. We can think of better ways to spend our time.

If you need more background information on why the LBA mod is not as good as drive partitioning, take a look at our previous article on the issue, Modding A Barracuda 7200.11 Into A VelociRaptor. If you have any questions, or feedback, don't hesitate to post them in the official forum thread for this topic.

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