Introduction: Hacks #40-57

No matter how fast your CPU or memory are, disk drives and peripherals are the biggest bottlenecks to system performance. After you spend all day tweaking and revving up your CPU and memory, you're rewarded with the same old sluggish disk drives, which undermine any other performance-improving hacks. In this chapter, we'll cover some easy and often free tune-ups to get your disks living up to your system's demands and your expectations of reliability by making informed partitioning choices and using the tools necessary to prepare a hard drive for file storage.