How to maintain and optimize the hard disk?

　Correct installation of a hard drive

Hard disk installation is different from other parts, it is afraid of impact vibration of vulnerable parts, so when the installation should pay attention to light, in the mobile also want to avoid strong

Strong vibration, so as not to damage the hard disk disc, causing the physical damage can not be repaired.

Most of the hard drives are installed on the 3.5-inch cage of the chassis instead of the 5-inch retention cage on which the CD-ROM is installed. First, gently place the hard drive in the slot and align the screw holes on the hard drive to the screw holes on the socket cage, and then screw the hard drive.

　Data cable

Currently, the hard drives we use are ATA66 or higher specifications, so the IDE cable is also a 80-core ATA133/100/66 IDE hard drive cable. All AC97 compliant IDE data cables have three interfaces, all of which are color-coded, with blue as the system interface for connecting to the IDE interface on the motherboard. Black for Master (main device) interface, gray for slave (from Device) interface, are used to connect the hard drive, optical drive, and other IDE devices.

If the hard drive is set as the primary device, be sure to install it on the main device interface of the IDE's data cable, and if you set it from the device, be sure to install it on the interface, or an error will occur. Standard IDE data cables, different colors of the interface for different purposes. When connecting to a data cable, be careful not to reverse it.

　　Hard drive jumper

In addition to wiring, the hard drive installation process of another can not be ignored is the hard drive of the master-slave device jumper. Of course, the master and slave disk jumpers are only needed when two hard drives are connected to a single data line. Because the hard drive's default settings are the main disk (that is, master), if the data cable is connected to only one hard drive, then it is of course the master disk, so it is not necessary to install a single hard drive jumper settings.

For most hard drives, there are three jumper specifications: Master, Slave (from), and cable Select (automatic selection of cables). When we choose the third specification, the computer will automatically set the master and slave mode of the hard disk. As for the jumper setting method, most vendors will give a detailed jumper setup diagram on the back of the hard disk. Some are given a simple schematic above the jumper interface. Most hard drives provide jumper settings on the back.

When connected to the hard disk, also pay attention to the pros and cons of the IDE data line interface, in addition to judging by the gap, but also remember that the IDE cable has a red line on one side should be close to the hard drive power interface direction. Some hard drives provide a way to set jumpers on their side. The Power interface of the hard disk uses the D-type interface, so it cannot be inserted in the opposite direction, avoiding the burning of the hard drive because of misoperation.

　　Correct way to partition hard disk

After understanding the proper installation and use of the hardware, let's take a look at how to partition the hard disk and how to properly partition it.

The new hard drive will not boot the system until it is partitioned and formatted. We can boot the system through bootable discs, such as the win98/me boot CD, or floppy disks with bootable features. If your system does not yet support this startup mode, go to the BIOS setup program and modify the first boot Device to either the ATAPI CD-ROM Drive (CD drive boot) or floppy Devices (floppy boot).

Use the Fdisk command to partition with CD or floppy boot system, into a DOS state, run the "Fdisk" command, the screen will appear a large paragraph of English message, the last line "Do you wish to enable large disksupport (y/n)?" Ask the user if you want to use the large hard drive mode, where you need to type "Y", or you cannot create a hard disk partition that exceeds 2GB capacity. After you run Fdisk, you will be asked if you want to use the large hard drive mode, then be sure to select Y, or you will not be able to create more than 2GB hard drives.

Create Primary DOS Partition

Next, into the Fdisk main interface, here are four options, which are as follows:

Create DOS partition or Logical DOS drive: Creating DOS partitions and logical drives

Set active partition: Setting active partitions

Delete partition or logical DOS drive: Delete partition or logical drive

Display partition information: displaying partition information

Create a DOS partition in Fdisk. If it is a new, no partition hard drive, select "1" and press ENTER, you will see a new window, select "1." Create Primary DOS Partition ", creating a primary DOS partition, the FDISK program will ask" Do your wish to use the Maximum available size for a Primary DOS partitio N (y/n) ", the default selection is" Y ", so that all hard disk space will be created as a partition, it is recommended to select" N "to create multiple partitions, otherwise it is not good for disk management, but also easy to cause the waste of hard disk space. Before you create a primary DOS partition, you are asked if you want to create all of the disk space as a single partition. The primary DOS partition has been partitioned, taking up 21% of the hard disk space.

There will be a short disk checksum, and then you need to set up the hard disk space assigned to the primary DOS partition in MB in the next window that appears, depending on the actual need to type the data or the percentage of the hard disk capacity to enter. When you are finished creating, press ESC to return to the main menu.

　　Create an extended DOS partition

Enter the "Create DOS Partition and logical Drive" window again, select "2. Create Extended dos Partition ", start creating an extended DOS partition, the program will first tell you the current hard disk can establish an extended DOS partition maximum space, direct return. Create an extended DOS partition without changing the system defaults and press ENTER directly.

　　Creating Logical partitions

When the extended DOS partition is created, the program will remind you that there is no logical partition Currently, press ESC to automatically enter the logical partition creation interface, the default is to create the current total space as a logical partition, it is recommended that you do not use the default settings, so as to establish more logical partitions, easy to manage hard disk data. To create a logical DOS partition, you can enter the corresponding numeric value as needed.

　viewing and deleting partitions

In the main window of FDISK, select 4. Display Partition Information "To view the partition information. If you are not satisfied with the partition capacity configuration, we can also select "3 delete partition or logical DOS Drive" to remove the partition. Delete a hard disk partition in the same order as you do when you partition, first delete the logical partition, then delete the extended partition before you can delete the primary DOS partition.

　Set up active partitions

In the Fdisk main interface, select 2. Set Active Partition "sets the active partition, and then type" 1 "(that is, C partition) to activate the primary partition. Activation means that the primary DOS partition of the hard disk is set to a bootable partition, and if not activated, an error is prompted at startup.

Now that the partition of the new hard drive is all over, we need to exit the FDISK program and reboot the system and use the Format command for advanced formatting.

　Advanced Zoning Tips

Before we explain the advanced partitioning techniques, it is important to understand the concept of clusters first. The file system is an important part of the operating system, and now our common Windows operating system can support a variety of file systems, such as FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS file systems. The file system is an interface between the operating system and the drive, and when the operating system requests that a file be read from the hard disk, the corresponding file system (FAT16, FAT32, NTFS) is requested to open the file, and the concept of the cluster appears. Although we know that a sector is the smallest physical storage unit for a disk, for a DOS operating system, the sector is much smaller (just 512 bytes) and DOS cannot address a large number of sectors. DOS is designed to handle only 216 disk units, and the disk unit can be a sector or a cluster of sector collections. So when using the FAT16 format, the sector must form a "cluster", each of which can include 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, or 64 sectors. A cluster is the logical concept used by the operating system, not the physical nature of the disk. Cluster size directly affects the size of the disk partition table, although the cluster can manage more disk space after the large, and can speed up reading and writing speed, improve the data seek time, but due to the size of the partition table and the increase in cluster capacity, it will also lead to waste of disk space.

For example, a file with only one byte occupies 2K of disk space on a partition of 2KB per cluster, and if this byte file occupies a 16KB space on a partition with 16KB per cluster. The space from the end of the file to the end of the cluster is called the cluster mount space, the larger the accumulated cluster overhang space, the larger the space wasted by the disk.

At this point, we need to find a partitioning method that can consider both performance and capacity. Usually such a method is called a cluster partition, and to do so requires the support of third-party partitioning software, such as Pqmagic (Division magician), which is the most common.

It is not difficult to see from the Pqmagic analysis chart that for a partition with data, too large a cluster can cause a waste of disk space.

Typically, the size of the cluster is set to 8KB to achieve a balance of performance and capacity for the partition capacity below 8GB.

If you want to make the most of your hard disk space, you need to use it for cluster partitioning. For example, if the partition is 8G and the partition is a boot partition, then setting the cluster to 8KB will save disk space more than having the cluster set to 16KB. Because boot partitions often require data reading and writing, which is often very large and small, using a larger cluster can be a waste of disk space and is not conducive to data addressing. But if this partition is a logical partition, and only a few large-capacity video files, there is no need to set the value of the cluster is too low, which is not conducive to reading and writing. It is not difficult to see that too large a cluster will cause a waste of disk space.

Also, it is not possible to set too small a partition with very large capacity, which affects not only the read and write speed, but also the file easily.