I suspect your optimizations works well with your DB solely because of the larger sector size and has nothing to do with your manual partition alignment. If you understand how modern hard drives work you would know that there is a lot of translation going on therefore trying to align the partition probably is not doing what you think its doing at the physical level. Anyway since the topic of this thread is discussing a general Win 7 installation and not the situation you describe where you are trying to squeeze the max performance out of a specific app I fail to see what relevance is has to this thread at all.
1) Partition aligning - works for all cases. 2) Sector size - you can leave it as default. You can gain a lot even if you do 1) only.
Partition aligning is always important. Try to find what Dell recommends for DB servers. It is very simple concept - reading unaligned sectors is 2 times slower than reading aligned ones.
If you don't believe me that disk partition alignment is essential, then you can read below. Here is information from Microsoft: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd758814.aspx ...A best practice that is essential yet often overlooked is disk partition alignment... ...For systems from which high performance is required, it is essential to experiment with representative workloads and determine the validity of disk partition alignment for your environment... Anyway, because the best way to install Windows 7 is formatting the disk, this is the best time to format the disk right.
I saw mention in the thread on 64bit Win7 that maybe that will open up Ramdisks as a way to speed things up.. it can address huge chunks of Ram..
I'm going to do a dual-boot system with Win7 when I get the upgrade (Ubuntu/64 is the current os, with an old XP sitting idle) XP/32 bits just doesn't do my 8 core system any justice, and XP performs poorly under load on many core systems. Linux/64 has been a great alternative for about 18 months, but with my other systems being Windows it's a bit easier keeping it all similar. I don't care much about older software, as my trading computers don't have any unnecessary sw on them. It'll be fun to compare performance between Win7/64 and Ubuntu/64. Worst case, I got back to Linux.
A really neat trick is to use USB memory sticks as cache for drives. It apparently makes a huge difference. Not sure why the reviewers used USB vs. system memory, so there must be something i don't fully understand yet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost Guess it's been there in Vista for years - LOL
Hmmm, USB sticks are not very fast. The wikipedia entry must be mad to claim 100 times improvement. You'll be lucky get 30 Mbytes/Sec over USB. Compare that to 80 MByte/Sec ++ for modern hard drives via SATA II. It might be useful for random access to small files, but for for sustained transfers - I doubt it. Just put a lot of memory in the machine and let the operating system buffer cache sort it all out.
I see no reason to migrate away from XP, where 1GB RAM and a 7,200rpm HDD runs apps faster than on Vista with 4GB RAM and a 10,000rpm HDD.
Yes, you can see 30 MBs read from USB flash, but write is SUPER slow... many are < .1 MBs for small files.