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Is it possible to limit hard drive IO per process?
I recently upgraded from a Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 2.8GHz to an i7 2600K @ 4.5GHz. It's a pretty big step from 2 slow cores to 4 fast cores.
Also, I've always used striping with two 7200 RPM SATA II drives in RAID 0 which gives me plenty of opportunity for multitasking.
My issue comes from software which assumes that I have 8 cores all free to attack the hard drive at the same time. Most notably 7zip, Visual Studio during compile and virtual machines. They so completely consume all available IO that I am unable do anything in the background. I'd much rather things take a while than consume all of my resources.
1Hard drives are only good at doing one thing at a time. You cannot write two things at once to a hard drive, running them one after another will always be quicker then trying to do the job parallel. RAID-0 does not help you multitask, it just allows higher sustained read/write speeds. – Breakthrough – 2011-07-02T19:36:44.123
I would think that Windows would be better at sharing such a limited resource as throughput between applications. But it seems like I just had a nice balanced before with less CPU power. – Josh Brown – 2011-07-04T16:53:51.993
Again, only one thing can possibly be read/written from/to a hard drive at a single point in time, so there's not much Windows can do about it. This has been the bottleneck of all computers for... Well, for all of time. Try running your tasks in series, one after another, instead of in parallel. I can guarantee you an exponential speed boost and increased drive longevity. – Breakthrough – 2011-07-04T16:59:01.403
Sorry, just one more small addition... Trying to use a mechanical hard drive to do more then one thing at a time is an example of thrashing in computer science. While this effect does present itself in modern solid-state drives, it is not nearly as much of a problem (since SSDs have higher read/write speeds and a significantly improved seek time).
– Breakthrough – 2011-07-06T13:56:03.960