Hard drives dont contribute to the operation of the hardware performance wise in any true way except that in which the operating system relays the data to you as a user.
I disagree.
Response time of a 5,400 v. 7,200 v. 10,000 v. 15,000 can make a hell of a difference.
Data transfer rate of increased densities (larger drives) can also make a hell of a difference too.
Sure, once the data is read into memory, it is much faster to access by several orders of magnitude.
But many applications are large enough that it can take tens of seconds to launch them, depending on their size.
The next generation of hybrid hard drives will add EEPROM ("flash") that will read-only cache most used files.
Despite popular belief, EEPROM -- the most common Solid State Device (SSD) technology -- is usually slower at writes, at cells fail much sooner than disk.
But it makes an outstanding fast and reliable media for reads, hence the coming hybrid designs.
Translation: Format and reinstall will bring you back to 100% speed.
This is a common, but often incorrect, assumption.
Although there are some aspects to Windows that benefit from a full re-install, I've never seen this from a "general computing" aspect.
Sure, Windows -- because it lumps everything into one filesystem -- fragments like a bitch.
And Windows causes all sorts of non-sense to be integrated into its core system.
Those of themselves increase load times and performance issues.
But if you avoid them, even Windows can be tamed.
EVERYTHING YOU INSTALL, EVERYWHERE YOU BROWSE... adds a few chips onto the pile.
Not true, if you know what you're doing.
Merely installing software does not cause this, although installing software that does into the OS does.
Avoiding such software, especially using open source software, generally prevents this non-sense.
Firefox + Noscript prevents a lot of this non-sense at the browser, whereby you only enable scripts for sites you trust.
Now after a year, that's a lotta chips. The computer has to l.. ahem, the hard drive has to look through all those chips everytime it wants to find just one or two of 'em.
Huh? A hard drive is well indexed, and even NTFS' aged FAT approach is decent on performance.
De-fragmentation can address non-contiguous files.
Storage on the hard drive is
rarely the issue, although older hard drives can have slower latency/transfer compared to newer ones.
I think you're confusing total storage with run-time aspects.
Your total storage usage does
not affect your run-time performance, although the system loading non-sense does.
A registry will only expand, the partition will only get fragmented.. and there is only downhill to go from 100%.
The registry can be tamed to a point, and avoiding programs that use it or only use it proper, are a good way.
Still, a PC is nigh useless after five years. Tech marches on with or without our cooperation. Hell, flash 9 is proving that to me all the time.
Well, buggy web sites are that problem, and Flash loads a lot of crap.
