Making the hard drive faster

[twocs]

I want to get my computer to run really smoothly. So I'm thinking there's a bottleneck on my hard drives, both internal and external. How can I get it to go faster? What's better, USB 2.0, Firewire, or SATA, or should I try to get enough flash memory and save the OS on there for a really fast boot?

I went to the computer shop, and he told me not to try to use IDE with my notebook computer, but I look inside and I see that the internal drive is SATA. But if I connect an external drive it has to be USB 2.0. That can't be the fast efficient way to get my system to run quickly.  It's already 2007, and it still takes around a minute to boot up my computer! (I can boot up faster with hibernate, but after a couple days Vista gets very unstable)

By the way, the interface for my notebook is:

1 x VGA port/Mini D-sub 15-pin for external monitor

1 x Headphone-out jack (SPDIF)

1 x Microphone-in jack

1 x RJ11 Modem jack for phone line

1 x RJ45 LAN Jack for LAN insert

5 x USB 2.0 ports, 1x IEEE 1394 port

1 x TV Out (S-Video composite)

1 x Express Card

1 x Infrared Port(SIR-115.2Kbps supported)

1 x DVI Port

[digip]

SATA is faster the the other two. USB is 480mbps and Firewire is 400mbps, but USB slows down the more devices hooked up, and Firewire doesnt daisy chain vey well. In my expereince any USB and Firewire connected external drives are dreadfully slow and only get about 10-20 megs/sec transfer as any internal(even PATA) scream past this. SATA is the way to go, but even a PATA setup witll be faster than any external drives.

Laptops would be best to just upgrade the internal drive to a faster and larger drive. Anything attached would slow you down, unless your accessing over a network to a NAS or local lan with a 10/100/1000 connection. The faster the better. Laptops wer enot designed for multiple hard drive attachments and any external drives attached is only going to slow down that process.

[VaKo]

If you want speed, you will need to upgrade your internal laptop HD to one with a higher RPM, or look at the solid state discs. External drives are pretty much just for data archiving imho.

[Sparda]

connection = fast

physical internal mechanism = slow

flash = slower then hard drive mechanism

10,000RPM hard drive = fastest actual hard drive

Alternatives = HyperDrive4 = expencive = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nxz1jcw_FvI (but vista stril runs very slow) = https://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/07042003/purchase.htm

[incripshin]

Just defragment it.  Oh wait, that's if you want the hard drive to be deader.

I think you should upgrade your RAM if you can.  This will decrease the page faults a lot.  SATA and PATA drives are the same in terms of speed.  The bus that SATA uses just has more potential for growth.

I could be totally wrong here, but I would suppose that upgrading to 7200 (if that's possible with notebook drives) is not a good idea.  It will make your laptop faster, but also hotter than it was designed for, louder, and the battery life will be shorter.  It may also be that the power supply can't take that much power and end up going 'pop'.  I don't think the performance record of lithium ion batteries is very good, so I wouldn't push it.