Secondary Storage

Performance Enhancement

Three ways to improve the performance of hard disks are:-

Dick caching

~A portion of RAM used to speed up access to data on a disk. The RAM can be part of the dick drive itself (sometimes called a hard disk cache or buffer) or it can be general-purpose RAM in the computer that is reserved for use by the disk drive (sometimes called a soft disk cache). While the hard drive's hardware disk buffer is sometimes misleadingly referred to as "disk cache", its main functions are write sequencing and read prefetching. Repeated cache hits are relatively rare, due to the small size of the buffer in comparison to HDD's capacity.


Redundant array of inexpensive disks (RAID)

~Redundant array of inexpensive disks, a category of disk drives that employ two or more drives in combination for fault tolerance and performance. RAID disk drives are used frequently on servers but aren't generally necessary for personal computers. RAID allows you to store the same data redundantly (in multiple paces) in a balanced ay to improve overall performance.

File compression and decompression

~The NTFS file system volumes support file compression on an individual file basis. The file compression algorithm used by the NTFS file system is Lempel-Ziv compression. This is a lossless compression algorithm, which means that no data is lost when compressing and decompressing the file, as opposed to lossy compression algorithms such as JPEG, where some data is lost each time data compression and decompression occur.

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