Windows
Home Server uses the hard disk to fetch application data and documents
as well as to temporarily store data in the paging file. Therefore,
optimizing your hard disk can greatly improve Windows Home Server’s
overall performance, as described in the next few sections.
Examining Hard Drive Performance Specifications
If you’re looking to add another drive to your
system, your starting point should be the drive itself: specifically,
its theoretical performance specifications. Compare the drive’s average
seek time with other drives. (The lower the value, the better.) Also,
pay attention to the rate at which the drive spins the disk’s platters.
A 7,200 RPM (or higher) drive has noticeably faster performance than,
say, a 5,400 RPM drive. Most drives today spin at 7,200 RPM, although
you can find faster if you’re willing to pay a premium. (Beware of
so-called “green” hard drives, which are designed to save power but do
so at the cost of performance because most of them spin at a measly
5,400 RPM.)
Finally, the drive type can make a big speed
difference. For example, USB 2.0 has a theoretical data transfer rate
of up to 480Mbps, whereas the data transfer rates for FireWire 400 and
FireWire 800 are about 400Mbps and 800Mbps, respectively. However,
compare these speeds with the theoretical data transfer rate of USB 3.0
drives, which can sling data at up to 5Gbps, and eSATA (external SATA)
drives, which can achieve up to 2.4Gbps. (Of course, you can only use
an eSATA drive if your Windows Home Server computer’s motherboard
supplies an eSATA connector or if you add a controller card that offers
one or more eSATA ports.)
Performing Hard Drive Maintenance
For an existing drive, optimization is the same as maintenance. For a hard disk, this means doing the following:
Keeping an eye on the disk’s free space to make sure that it doesn’t get too low
Periodically cleaning out any unnecessary files on the disk
Uninstalling any programs or devices you no longer use
Frequently checking all partitions for errors
Regularly defragmenting partitions
Disabling Compression and Encryption
Windows Home Server’s partitions use the NTFS file
system, which means they support compressing files to save space, as
well as encrypting files for security. From a performance point of
view, however, you shouldn’t use compression and encryption on a
partition. Both
technologies slow down disk accesses because of the overhead involved
in the compression/decompression and encryption/decryption processes.
Turning Off Windows Search
Windows Search is a service that indexes the contents of the Windows Home Server shared folders as well as the contents of %SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings.
Windows Search indexes these locations on-the-fly as you add or delete
data. This greatly speeds up content-based file searches because
Windows Home Server knows the contents of each file. However, if you
frequently transfer data to Windows Home Server, you may find that the
indexer (it’s the searchindexer.exe process in Task Manager)
uses a great deal of resources. If you never use the Windows Search
service, or if you never use the Search box that appears in the Shared
Folders tab of the Remote Access website, you should consider turning
off the Windows Search service. To do this, follow these steps:
1. | Select Start, Administrative Tools, Services to open the Services snap-in.
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2. | Double-click the Windows Search service.
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3. | Click Stop.
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4. | In the Startup Type list, select Disabled.
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5. | Click OK.
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Enabling Write Caching
You should also make sure that your hard disk has write caching
enabled. Write caching means that Windows Home Server doesn’t flush
changed data to the disk until the system is idle, which improves
performance. The downside is that a power outage or system crash means
the data never gets written, so the changes are lost. The chances of
this happening are minimal because changed data is flushed to the hard
drive quite frequently, so I recommend leaving write caching enabled,
which is the Windows Home Server default.
You can get even more of a performance boost if your
system uses a serial ATA (SATA) hard drive, because SATA drives include
extra cache features. This hard drive performance improvement is
theoretical because on most systems Windows doesn’t activate write
caching. However, because the advanced SATA drive write caching is more
aggressive, losing data is a distinct possibility unless your system is
protected by an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) or a battery backup.
To make sure the write caching setting is activated
for a hard drive and to turn on a SATA drive’s advanced caching
features, follow these steps:
1. | Select Start, type device, and then click Device Manager in the search results. Windows Home Server displays the Device Manager window.
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2. | Open the Disk Drives branch and double-click the hard disk you want to work with to display its property sheet.
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3. | In the Policies tab, make sure that the Enable Write Caching on the Device check box is activated.
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4. | For maximum performance with a SATA drive, activate the Turn Off Windows Write-Cache Buffer Flushing on the Device check box.
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5. | Click OK.
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Caution
Let me reiterate here that activating the Turn Off
Windows Write-Cache Buffer Flushing on the Device option tells Windows
Home Server to use an even more aggressive write-caching algorithm.
However, an unscheduled power shutdown means you will almost certainly
lose some data. Activate this option only if your system is running off
a UPS or has a battery backup.
