How to Increase Hard Drive Performance on Windows

Modern computer systems are fast, and a large hard drive helps to quickly retrieve files and programs. There is no need to worry, you can increase disk speed with proper maintenance and avoid problems that slow down your disk speed.    

Nowadays, you can check the speed and performance of a hard drive using benchmarking software. Not so much due to the fact that you will be able to take a number of measures to run a particular computer hard drive in tiptop form. Here is an overview of free tools that can measure the performance of the hard drive of your Windows 10 PC.    

My HDD Speed is one of the free benchmarking tools for hard drives that tracks the speed and performance of your drive in real-time. CrystaldiskMark is a trusted disk benchmarking program that measures the speed of sequential reading and writing of selected test data, supports topics, multiple languages, and more.    

There are some hot benchmarking tools, but not all of them will give you the best results. Do not disable services based on these recommendations, but it is good to understand what Windows offers and what the solutions are.    

For example, you can regularly scan, clean, and defragment your hard disk, perform a clean installation of your operating system, disable sleep mode, and convert your hard disk partition to NTFS. You have full control over what data you want to delete, and you never have to worry about deleting anything important.   

If you use a hard drive (HDD) for storage and not a solid-state drive (SSD) for storage, read the documentation or jump to the next tool. Hard drives are an essential part of any computer because they store everything via your PC’s operating system. Without high memory and a powerful CPU, without a hard disk, your computer runs slowly.    

In general, smaller hard drives perform best compared to larger ones because they have the same or similar speed. The reason larger hard drives seem to work faster is that they are made up of newer and faster technologies, not smaller capacity ones.    

If the CPU finds the required data from the hard disk in the cache, it saves time by loading the data in memory instead of requesting the drive to fetch it from the hard disk. Since the data is written to the cache much faster, performance is improved.   

Go to the Start menu, click Start menu, select Device Manager, click Login, click the drive you want to change, choose Properties, click the Policy tab, and select Enable Write to Cache on that device. When you enable write to cache in the Device Manager, your computer can store data in a cache instead of transferring it to your hard drive. If the data is not transferred to the hard disk when the computer is switched off, you will lose the data. Windows Disk Management, built into Windows 10, is another tool that allows you to increase the performance of your hard drive.  

When you save a file, it writes all the information, including the data, to a temporary location. A new way to keep storage space in use is to enable the Storage Sense option (see picture below). This frees up space by removing temporary files and disposing of items from the recycle bin.   

Windows 10 indexes your hard drive in the background, which theoretically allows you to browse your PC while indexing is done. The Windows ReadyBoost function tells Windows to cache data to a USB stick that is faster than a hard drive. When the system stores the cached data on your hard drives, it must cache the data locally before fetching it.  

Also Read: Microsoft will end support for Windows 10 in 2025: All you need to know(updated)

Caching is a feature included in both the Vista and Windows 7 versions that allows you to write information to a cache before writing it to disk. To increase disk performance, the cache must be faster than the information written to and cached on the disk itself.  

If you are using a drive on a Windows machine, you can optimize file copying performance by formatting the drive with NTFS. External storage devices are pre-formatted with EXFAT for compatibility with Macs and Windows computers. In case of reformatting the exFAT file system, you must delete the volume in Disk Management and follow the instructions to format the hard disk with the new file system.    

Game Booster defragments game files on non-SSD hard drives to optimize system configuration for games and disables background processes that affect game performance. Upgrading to a solid-state drive is one of the best ways to improve the performance of older hardware. Reset device to factory settings: You can reset the computer’s factory settings and reboot with a clean copy of Windows 10 to improve boot, shutdown, battery life, and overall system performance.   

The latest native Windows utility to improve the speed and efficiency of your disk and disk management. Using a large number of partitions is one of the most overlooked ways to speed up disks. If the reader does not need to be moved, the hard drive does not need to be moved to access data, and read time is reduced.   

Time is the time taken by the write mechanism (read/write head) to write data to the sector being read/written. Latency is the time it takes the disk to rotate the disk sectors from reading/write to read/write the head, this is called rotation latency.    

It is easy to check hard drive errors with this useful tool of Windows XP. It provides simple checkbox options to check for file system errors and restore bad sectors.    

Also Read: A Guide to Recover Data from Corrupt or Crashed Hard Drive

There are also third-party tools that you can use to improve the performance of your PC hard drive by deleting unnecessary files, freeing up disk space, and removing garbage such as caches and cookies. Windows Disk Management offers you another way to defragment your hard drive for disk acceleration, with the added bonus of defragmentation. Hibernation is a feature shared by others that optimizes the performance of the XP hard drive by putting the hard drive into hibernation under XP.    

Windows Disk Management is intuitive and automatically shuts down the PC when the defragmentation process is complete. Some PCs have built-in defragmentation tools, but third-party defragmentation tools such as Defraggler offer more control.