If you suspect that the disk system is the cause of the entire system running slow, you may need to find a solution quickly. However you should ensure that you investigate the problem thoroughly so that the quick fix is the right fix.

For example you might assume that installing another disk offers a quick fix; adding a disk is an appropriate solution if you can move files to a new disk, if you can create a striped volume, or if you are out of space.

However, for disk-space problems only, you might want to compress your drive, provided that the processor has available cycle to handle the compression activity and that your disk requests are typically large.

If your disk system is too slow, consider the following alternative steps::

• First rule out a memory shortage. When memory is scarce, the Virtual Memory Manager writes more pages to disk, resulting in increased disk activity.
• Defragment the disk using a Disk Defragmentation program. Disk Defragmenter is included with Windows 2000, for Windows NT try a third party application.
• For Windows 2000 use Diskpar.exe on the Windows 2000 Resource Kit companion CD to reduce performance loss due to misaligned disk tracks and sectors.
• Use striped volumes for faster reading and writing and improved storage capacity. With striped volumes the disk utilization per disk is reduced due to the distribution of work across the devices.
• If you have multiple disks on the same I/O consider moving some of the devices to a separate I/O bus. This would enable the disks to enjoy more service time from the controller and potentially increase the I/O throughput.

If you have a multiple device system with one disk under a greater strain than the other devices you might consider splitting the workload across several drives/controllers, e.g. for database applications, you might want to put transaction logs on a separate spindle from the data.