Can the sizes of files affect the performance of a hard drive?
I have two hard drives:
74GB, 7200rpm SATA, primary, partitioned in half, WinXP is installed on this drive, 5GB used.
233GB, 7200rpm IDE, secondary, filed with stuff, no system files, 160GB used.
My problem is, recently, my secondary hard drive has been slow in accessing folders. It can take several seconds, before, there was no lag. There are no programs that are routed to it, it has its own power connection and ribbon cable. Ive tried defragmenting and scanning with no improved perfomance. Also, in the folders that do have a lot of files, about 400+, they load up really slow too, despite the fact that the windows system32 folder has 2000+ files and opens up immediately. Even PerfectDisk is taking its time defragmenting. Access from Knoppix to the drive was immediate.
The primary drive works fine, there are no noticeable problems with folder access.
Now, it occured to me that the primary hard drive has very few large files on it, largest being the pagefile. On the secondary, there are a fair number of large files, like distros and betas, and backed up data in RAR archives. I even archived up alot of small files in an effort to speed things up.
So, would having a lot of large files slow down a hard drive?
I have two hard drives:
74GB, 7200rpm SATA, primary, partitioned in half, WinXP is installed on this drive, 5GB used.
233GB, 7200rpm IDE, secondary, filed with stuff, no system files, 160GB used.
My problem is, recently, my secondary hard drive has been slow in accessing folders. It can take several seconds, before, there was no lag. There are no programs that are routed to it, it has its own power connection and ribbon cable. Ive tried defragmenting and scanning with no improved perfomance. Also, in the folders that do have a lot of files, about 400+, they load up really slow too, despite the fact that the windows system32 folder has 2000+ files and opens up immediately. Even PerfectDisk is taking its time defragmenting. Access from Knoppix to the drive was immediate.
The primary drive works fine, there are no noticeable problems with folder access.
Now, it occured to me that the primary hard drive has very few large files on it, largest being the pagefile. On the secondary, there are a fair number of large files, like distros and betas, and backed up data in RAR archives. I even archived up alot of small files in an effort to speed things up.
So, would having a lot of large files slow down a hard drive?