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People are always telling me how their computer’s slow. They tell me this, and then they say ‘but, I’m going to buy a bigger/external hard drive, and that will make it faster!’. Then, they ask me what I reccemend as far as external hard drives go.

Now, I could just tell them to buy one that supports ethernet and get back to my blank stare, but something compels me to consult my vast knowledge and offer them useful advice.

I tell them that you can’t make something work faster by giving it more storage. Their money would be better spent upgrading the processor or expanding the memory. And they always get this confused look on their face, like they just realized I was an idiot or something. They’re always like ‘but, i’ve got A LOT of stuff on my computer. It was running quickly before I put all of that stuff on there. You’re obvious an idiot.’

Usually, I’ll just let it go at that – I see no reason to engage somebody if they haven’t even read a pamplet on how a computer works. If they think I’m an idiot, then the jokes on them as far as I’m concerned.

However, I’ve been asked this question so many times, by so many people, that maybe if I explain it throughly once on my blog, people will read it and finally understand.

Let’s make-believe. I want to read a book, and imagine it in my head. I grab a book off of my bookshelf, and find a chapter to read. You can liken this activity to your computer reading data off of a hard drive in order to use it. The time it takes for me to flip to the page I want to read, in hard drive terms, is called a seek time. It’s simply the time it takes for your computer to decide it needs a file, until the hard drive physically locates the infomation and is ready to use it. This is measured in miliseconds.

Now, I’ve found the page in my book, and I begin to read. Although there are 60,000 pages in my book, I’m only looking at one page, and on that page i’m only focusing on one sentence at any given moment. A Hard Drive works the same way, if your system is running the way its suppose to (which – let’s face it – it’s probably not), the speed you can read the data off of the hard drive shouldn’t be affected if you have 100GB or 30GB free.

Now, if you have less than ~10% free space left on your drive, then your computer is going to be crippled. Your computer requires enough disk space avalible for it to maintain itself. When you run the Disk Defragmenter, for example, the computer organizes the data on the drive to optimize seek times and prevent wear and tear. Defragmenter can’t just move data from one spot, directly to another. It has to move data to one centeral location, and then move it where it wants it afterwards. If your computer doesn’t have enough disk space avalible to reliably perform this process, your partition isn’t going to last that long.

Other than the 10% rule, (after defragging) your computer could care less how much data is stored on the drive. Sure, it might take a quarter second longer to find the file, but once it finds the file you will recieve the file as quickly as your computer can retrive it. There are ‘faster’ hard drives avalible. Especially if your on a laptop, a new hard drive might make some kind of noticabe impact on how fast files are retrived. But, I’m afraid this particular detail is often misunderstood.

The important thing to note here is that the CPU (which processes data) doesn’t recieve data directly from the hard drive. Data from the hard drive is placed in to RAM (what we computer folks refer to as memory, as in ‘Random Access Memory’), and the really-really-fast CPU can talk to the faster-than-slow RAM instead of the slower-than-slow hard drive. The computer can only recieve so much data from the hard drive at any given moment, and since a CPU can handle more data at once than a hard drive is capable of providing, it uses the faster RAM to manipulate data.

This being the case, if you want to do something to increse the performace of your computer, you would first make sure that you had enough RAM to handle all of the data your computer needs at any given moment. If it doesn’t, the computer will continually rely on the hard drive to refresh it’s memory, and create a large performance bottleneck.

Another thing to look at is if your CPU is realisticly powerful enough to handle all the data you want it to at any given moment. In this day and age, you can buy a powerful dual core processor with the change you dig out of your couch, and if you don’t have one – you should probably just get one. RAM and CPU’s are dependant on each other, and certain CPU’s require certain types of RAM. You’re best bet at the moment, is getting an Intel Core 2 Duo processor with fast DDR2 RAM, although that’s subject to change tommorow.

Generally, most performance problems can be traced back to the operating system. Even modest hardware can see dramatic speed increses by adapting your computer habbits and cleaning up your system. Even though Windows XP and Vista are far and away from the best performing operating systems on the planet, if properly taken care of, you can do a lot with them on old hardware.

After explaining how a computer uses data, it should be apperent that if you want your computer to run faster, then you load less data in to the memory. Less data in the memory, the less data the CPU has to process.

Uninstalling programs you never use, optimizing antivirus software, removing Internet Explorer add-ons, and running msconfig can do wonders for a slow system. A lot of times, a system will be so far gone that you might need to reinstall the operating system, and maintain the system properly after a clean install.

A lot of times a slow computer would run quickly if only you weren’t running so much useless shit. Even the fastest computer will run like a 286 if you don’t take care of it.

So, the answer in a nutshell? Buy bigger hard drives to store more, not because they’ll make your computer faster. If you want your computer to run faster, look at the components that effect system performance. Software, Memory and CPU.

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