For optimal system performance, you need to place your OS and all of your most commonly used applications and files in the fastest areas on the drive. Accomplishing this goal involves creating a primary partition of the correct size on the drive and then installing your OS and apps there. You can partition and use the remainder of the drive, too, but you should store only infrequently accessed data there.

With the Velociraptor hard drive we tested, performance began to drop noticeably at about the 200GB mark, as the HD Tune graph above indicates. By the 300GB mark, transfer rates had fallen by about 50 MBps from their initial speed, and they continued to decline from there. 200GB is plenty of space for a primary partition, so that's the size we'd make ours.

Once you've identified the sweet spot on your drive, create a primary partition of the optimal size. You can do this either during the initial setup phase (when installing the OS) or while the drive is connected to a system whose OS is already installed. To create a partition during a fresh installation of Windows, follow the on-screen prompts during the first phase of the setup process until you reach the point of choosing a target drive. Then click Drive Options (advanced), select your drive on the resulting screen, and specify the partition size. To create a partition on a drive connected to a system that already has Windows installed, connect the drive, boot into Windows, click the Start button, type Disk Management in the Search/Run field, and press Enter. The Disk Management utility will open and, if it detects a new blank drive, will usually launch a wizard. If no wizard launches, right-click the entry for the drive in the list at the bottom of the window, and choose the option to create a new volume. Because Windows uses binary measurements in megabytes to specify partition sizes, 1 gigabyte contains 1024 megabytes. Consequently, in specifying our 200GB partition, we had to identify a partition size of 204,800MB (200 × 1024).

To gauge the performance benefits of short-stroking a hard drive, we ran a couple of popular benchmarks--HD Tune 5.0 and --on our 1TB Velociraptor hard drive, first with a single partition that spanned the entire drive and a second time with a primary partition consisting of the drive's highest-performance, first 200GB of space.