Understanding "bottlenecks" in your computer...

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This question was answered on June 25, 2001. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.

Few things in computing are as irritating as having to wait. What is in essence a few seconds seems like an eternity when we want something from our computers. I call it the “microwave syndrome” – it’s never fast enough!

“Bottlenecks” slow the flow of data and are everywhere in your computer, but the ones that actually affect your computing speed depends upon your applications. Gamers, CAD and graphic designers will experience more bottlenecks than those that simply surf the web, check their e-mail and write a few letters.

Your computer has 3 basic components that will determine your overall performance. They are your processor, RAM and the hard drive. Of the three, the processor is the fastest and the hard drive is the slowest. In simple terms, everything outside of the processor is a bottleneck to the processor. The motherboard bus speed, RAM, video card, operating system, applications and especially the hard drive all cause the processor to have to wait (often referred to as “wait states”).

The biggest bottleneck in the computer is the hard drive. No matter how you use your computer, the hard drive is the single component that can cause the biggest slowdown. It’s also the most overlooked component in today’s computers. Most people focus solely on the storage parameters when looking at hard drives, but there are many other issues to consider if you truly want to reduce this bottleneck.

Interfaces:

There are two main types of interfaces for the hard drive - IDE and SCSI. Most computers use basic IDE hard drives because they are much cheaper.

SCSI based drive systems can be twice as expensive because they require a special interface card, but the increase in performance can be dramatic. There are several different types of SCSI interfaces with the Ultra3Wide being the fastest. If money is no object, SCSI is for you.

If you are like the rest of us, you look for the “best bang for the buck”. The latest IDE hard drives have very respectable performance specs at a much lower cost. Look for an EIDE drive that uses the UltraDMA or UltraATA interface.

Performance specs:

The basic performance specs that you want to concentrate on are transfer rate, RPM, and average seek time. Transfer rates on current SCSI drives can range from 80 to 160 MBits/second. The best IDE drives can range from 66 to 100 MBits/second. The RPM spec refers to how fast the platters are spinning (the faster, the better). Generally they range from 5400 to 15,000 RPMs. 10,000 RPM and higher drives tend to have heat issues, so make sure you have a well ventilated area inside your computer to install them. When it comes to average seek time, the lower the number, the better the performance.

One of the cheapest ways to reduce the hard drive bottleneck effect is to add more RAM. Windows based computers use the hard drive for temporary memory space when they run out of RAM, so if your system does not have at least 128 MB of RAM you may want to increase it.

If you are a gamer or do a lot of graphic-intensive work, the video card can be a bottleneck, so you may want to research the latest in video card technology.

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