little-Known Tweak to Boost Hard Drive Performance
 

The speed at which your hard drive transfers data is very important, right? Especially if you need to copy a 20-gigabyte file, like I did. My laptop was initially copying the file at 2 MB/s because it was transferring in PIO-only mode, which would have taken almost three hours. Not only is PIO terribly slow, it consumes lots of CPU power. While copying that 20-gigabyte file, my CPU usage stayed at 100%. Therefore, I tried to figure out the best way to increase the transfer rate. I changed the transfer mode to UltraDMA-6, speeding it up by 600% to 12 MB/s, and the 20-gigabyte file copied in a little over 30 minutes. Plus, my CPU usage was only about 20-30%.