Interesting reading about hardware!

Maybe you hardware guru's may already know this, but after buying
"Microsoft's Windows XP networking inside out", I found an interesting
comment by the author relating to the file system used.

He states that, if you want speed over security, it is better to use Fat32
as opposed to NTFS. I tried this on a machine running Solidworks and he was
right!

Note:- "BACKUP UP FIRST, BEFORE TRYING THIS!"
A standard warning, but some might not know this and I would hate to be
"Flamed" whilst trying to help!.

When using NTFS and an assembly with 300 parts and 5 sub-assemblies each
with 7 parts, I lost 37 seconds opening the file and revolving the assembly
was a bit jittery!
This was on a brand new machine with only Solidworks2003 SP5 on it.
Changing to Fat32 helped a lot.(the server was unchanged)

Having to look after a network, I am always looking for ways to speed things
up.

Do you super bods, have any more tips that would help to make a "faster and
better" life, for us mere mortals?

 

Pete,

I know for a fact that on NT4, FAT16 was much faster than NTFS. I would use
this on all our machines. When we switched to Win2000, I carried this same
philosophy over and formatted for FAT32. It did seem a "little" faster than
the NTFS machines, but not as much as with NT4 and FAT16. It also caused
some problems. FAT32 wouldn't defragment very well with either Diskeeper or
Norton Speed Disk. I'm not counting the built in Win2000 utillity, because
it doesn't work very good on anything. I was also getting allot more
unexplained crashing on the FAT32 machines, and a whole helluva lot more HD
thrashing.

Regards

Mark

 

One interesting quirk to this is that if the drive with TEMP on it is FAT
then CosmosMotion will not run properly. It requires an NTFS partition.

This is a known speed up and is used by some of us regularly for SWAP
partitions because of the speed increase.

Perhaps a good use would be to partition a disk so that when using PDMWorks
a FAT partition was available for the local copies of PDMWorks parts and
the OS and program files remain inside NTFS where security would be more of
an issue.