Need help about hard drive space vs surfing time

[vananhdo]

Hello,
I'm doing my science fair project about the disk space occupied for storage (such as media files and documents) vs the disk space occupied for installing software. Which of them will make the surfing time longest? And will there be any formular to figure this out.

I don't think that my idea is "high school" level (I'm a 11th grader). Should I add anything to make it more advance? Thank you for answering my question.

[davidkallman]

Hi vananhdo,

The major factor in loading webpages (or any other use of the hard drive) in using the hard drive is fragmentation of free space. Fragmentation is how the free space space is organized:

at best, the free space is organized as one contiguous block (low fragmentation)

at worst, the free space is located in many small blocks located throughout the drive (high fragmentation)

The reason for the above is that the system can more quickly find free space on a less fragmented drive.

All said, I don't think that the drive's fragmentation level is going to be a key factor in loading webpages vs. the speed of your internet connection. I'm not sure how you measure and improve the fragmentation level.

Re making a challenging project: doing measurements on a system can be challenging as well as coming up with different items to measure and different system conditions to vary to improve performance.

[chizwiz]

Hi there,
I am confused about your phrasing: "disk space occupied for storage (such as media files and documents) vs the disk space occupied for installing software". There is really no distinction from the hard drive's perspective, all it is doing in either case is directionally magnetizing very small sections of an aluminum platter which can then be interpreted as either a 1 or 0 in binary code... the basis of all computer data. Whether it's storing a temporary JPG file from a browsing session, or you're installing Windows, the hard drive is doing the same thing.

I'm not sure what hypothesis you're testing with how much hard drive space is used to surf the web... perhaps we need a more detailed description of what you're testing and what variables are being used. However, many things affect the speed at which data is accessed on a mechanical hard drive; data fragmentation is an important factor (as mentioned above), but there is also the consideration of platter spin speed (most desktop drives spin the platters at 7,200 RPM, laptop drives typically run at 5,400 RPM to consume less power, and high-end server drives can get to 10,000 RPM, or even 15,000). The platter spin speed is important because the hard drive "head" (which sits just microns above the platter) that reads the magnetization has a limited movement path, so in order to quickly access data spread all over the platter, it must spin quickly to make its entire surface area available to the head as often as possible.

Something to think about for hypothesis testing: since hard disk drives are mechanical, meaning they have parts which physically move (as opposed to solid-state drives which are just high-capacity flash memory), how do external factors affect the performance? Temperature? Vibration? Noise level? etc

If you will be testing the performance of hard drives under different conditions, remember to keep the platform consistent. For example, if you're testing one hard drive with a Serial ATA (SATA) connection to the motherboard, and the other with an older IDE connection, the overall performance of the SATA drive will be significantly higher from the computer's perspective even if both drives are internally accessing the data at the same rate.

I sort of went off on a couple tangents there... just getting my brain to move around Let me know if this helps at all, or if you have a more specific question.
-Ian