speed up hardisk

this is taught by my friend,he say it did improve his system

To speed up your hard disk speed we need to configure a special buffer in the computer's memory in order to enable it to better deal with interrupts made from the disk.
This tip is only recommended if you have 256MB RAM or higher.
Follow these steps:
Run SYSEDIT.EXE from the Run command.
Expand the system.ini file window.
Scroll down almost to the end of the file till you find a line called [386enh].
Press Enter to make one blank line, and in that line type
Irq14=4096
Note: This line IS CASE SENSITIVE!!!
Click on the File menu, then choose Save.
Close SYSEDIT and reboot your computer.
Done. Speed improvement will be noticed after the computer reboots.
Update: The most speed improvement is visible with IDE drives, however there are reports that this tweak also does good for SCSI disks.


anyone had any comment on this.

 

sounds like a snake-oil pitch. Did you noticed any gain with your rig? How would your bubby measure this "performance" gain?

 

what OS is this for? does XP still use system.ini for much?

 

Got curious so I did a quick Google. The only link I came across that seems of relevance is here. http://www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/WinXP/Q_21062563.html Not a member so I could not read the feedback. Who wants to be the guinea pig?

 

OK...I can image/restore my OS in 40 seconds so I ran both tweaks (HDD and modem tweaks found on that website).

Tested with my current OS. Didn't notice any speed improvement with windows. Ran HDTune benchmarks. Still no improvement. Ran throughput speedtest using various websites. Still no improvement.

Hmmm...Restored an AS LOADED image file of WXP Pro SP1 (no other application added to OS). Still no improvement.

Conclusion...didn't work with WXP Pro SP1 and my NF4/AMD 64 rig.

 

Now you have me curious.......Going to give it a try on my 2k PC. I shall return, perhaps from my laptop.

 

Well I did not get technical and run any bench marks, but my seat of the pants meter tells me there is no difference.

 

OK...two data points...another bogus tweak.

 

thanks for feedback,my friend on xp pro.but i'm not sure with his config.i'm having problem trying out the tweak,it seem to hang when i run SYSEDIT.EXE.case closed

 

A few points. Assuming Windows NT on an Intel based platform.

NTFS driver handles disk I/O - will it actually be able to understand/know about this change (eg does it assume a hard coded value ?)
The NTFS driver has its own cache/buffer system, its dynamic its very good (even the linux guys like the design ), it handles free ram and system load very well. This tweak I doubt would have very little impact.

Too few interupts can actually reduce multitasking of the computer as the i/o requests can get queued up for too long, if there is a stall (lets say from another drive on the same ide channel), there is so much buffered the recovery time will be much greater (the buffer will need to be flushed to switch to the pending i/o from the other device and then swap back).
Thats why even with large amounts of ram we have today, i/o operations are kept to small amounts, as it allows the i/o slices to be small swap between different devices quickly.

Im not an expert on SCSI, but I thought the SCSI device itself handled interupts ?