Partial-stroking / Short-stroking / Half-stroking Hard Drives

hard driveperformance

Could anyone here explain to me what is implied by this term? (I've seen the same thing mentioned with the 3 terms).

At first when I read about it, for some reason I understood that it was some way of splitting the bytes across the platters of the disk, which sounded like a good idea and obviously doesn't make sense, because that wouldn't cut disk size in half (and disk are probably already splitting bytes across platters)…

The best I've come to understand is that basically instead of creating one partition for the whole size of the disk, you create 2 partitions, and use only one of them, either the one in the "center" or the one in the "rim" of the platters, and since one of the two is faster (people didn't seem to agree on which one was faster), that makes everything better.

Am I understanding this correctly?
Has anyone tried this with their drives and had a good outcome?

Thanks!

Best Answer

Short-stroking is basically what you found. You specifically use only the last few tracks on each platter of your hard disk. I have heard of this, but haven't looked at it in a while.

Looking at new articles, as well as from memory, the details about this are a mixed bag, mainly bad from my perspective.

  • Extremely reduced capacity for the drive because short-stroking only shows a benefit with very small "drive" sizes.
  • Roughly 40% better random seek times.
  • Slightly faster bulk transfer rates.
  • Requires specialized software that doesn't seem to be widely available.
  • When used in a RAID 0 array (as most articles recommend) this uses a lot of power for relatively small drive sizes.

I have previously recommended against ideas like this, as just buying larger, faster disks is cheaper in the long run, unless you don't pay for your electricity. The time savings may help in a database server with very little memory, but I can think of no other situation.

In general reading from the outside sectors of the platters is faster, as more sectors pass under the heads per second at 7500 RPM (or whatever) than towards the middle. Also, the heads rest on the outside of the drive when resting so, making a partition only near the center of the drive could actually give you worse seek speeds.

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