Tom's hardware forced all the data to the outer sectors of the hard drive. While this reduces capacity it also cuts down on seek time significantly, which would have a tremendous effect on hard drive performance in a database scenario. It appears they got >100% performance boost in database benchmarks with this technique. See this benchmark result: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157-...
It may also boost your cost by 1000%. This is a relatively poor article; you can short-stroke without any special utilities by simply creating a smaller partition and they didn't test the Intel X25-E.
2 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 15.1 ms ] thread