Question Best way or software to increase HDD Speed or overclock HDD without defragmenting or replacing with SSD?

[youself2670]

What's the best way or software to overclock HDD or increase HDD Speed without defragmenting or replacing with SSD? My HDD is too slow.

 

[USAFRet]

What's the best way or software to overclock HDD or increase HDD Speed without defragmenting or replacing with SSD? My HDD is too slow.

There is no "overclock" on an HDD.
It is what it is.

Define 'too slow'.
Please give us some details on this system.

 

[rakinar2]

What's the best way or software to overclock HDD or increase HDD Speed without defragmenting or replacing with SSD? My HDD is too slow.

HDDs are generally slow. But if you are experiencing too much slow performance, then probably your HDD is dying. In that case you should buy a new drive and try taking out important data from the old one.

Also, your OS or the applications might be using the HDD in background, you can open Task manager if you're using windows and see what's going on.

 

[hotaru.hino]

The only way to make a hard drive perform better is to spin it up faster. However, given it's a mechanical device, unless it was designed for that speed, chances are you're going to break it faster if you ask it to go significantly faster than what it was shipped with.

I read a while ago there is a way to improve performance, but it also means sacrificing a huge chunk of the hard drive's capacity. That is, you modify the firmware so the drive heads don't go past a certain point. Which I'm sure you don't want.

Also Windows defrags HDDs in the background. Chances are your drive isn't fragmented all that much.

 

[USAFRet]

I read a while ago there is a way to improve performance, but it also means sacrificing a huge chunk of the hard drive's capacity. That is, you modify the firmware so the drive heads don't go past a certain point. Which I'm sure you don't want.

An old school concept known as 'short stroking'.

The outer tracks of a hard drive flow past the heads faster than the inner.
So if you wipe the drive, reformat so that you only use a partition consuming the outer 1/3 or 1/4...it is sort of faster than the regular drive.
Of course, you've now cut down on the available space.
A 1TB HDD would then be 350GB or 250GB. Serious waste of space and money.

 

[Bob.B]

What's the best way or software to overclock HDD or increase HDD Speed without defragmenting or replacing with SSD? My HDD is too slow.

There is not much you can do.

Enable write caching in device manager for the hdd.
Enable the optimize app for the hdd.

Most folks just switch to ssd.