7 Tips to Improve Disk Speeds After Running Nero DriveSpeed
Running Nero DriveSpeed can highlight bottlenecks and help you understand your disk’s real-world performance. Below are seven practical, prioritized steps to improve read/write speeds based on common benchmark findings.
- Check and update firmware and drivers
- What to do: Update your SSD/HDD firmware and your motherboard’s chipset and storage controller drivers (SATA/NVMe).
- Why it helps: Firmware updates fix efficiency and compatibility issues; updated drivers ensure the OS communicates optimally with the drive.
- Enable the correct interface and mode (AHCI/PCIe/NVMe)
- What to do: In BIOS/UEFI, confirm SATA is set to AHCI (not IDE) for SSDs and ensure NVMe drives use the full PCIe lanes.
- Why it helps: AHCI and native NVMe modes unlock advanced features and better throughput.
- Verify proper connections and cables
- What to do: Use quality SATA III cables and connect SATA drives to motherboard ports that support 6 Gbps; for NVMe, ensure drives are in x4 slots or M.2 slots wired to the CPU if possible.
- Why it helps: Poor cables or wrong ports can throttle speeds.
- Free up space and maintain healthy free capacity
- What to do: Keep at least 10–20% free space on SSDs; trim large unused files, uninstall unneeded apps, and move infrequently used files to secondary storage.
- Why it helps: SSD performance degrades when near full capacity; wear leveling and garbage collection need free blocks to operate efficiently.
- Enable TRIM and run filesystem optimizations
- What to do: On Windows, ensure TRIM is enabled (run “fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify” — result 0 = enabled). Run built-in optimizations (Defragment for HDDs, Optimize for SSDs). On Linux, ensure discard/ fstrim is configured.
- Why it helps: TRIM informs SSDs which blocks are unused so they can be cleaned, preserving write performance.
- Check for background processes and reduce IO contention
- What to do: Use Task Manager/Resource Monitor (Windows) or iotop/htop (Linux) to identify heavy disk-using processes; pause or reschedule backups, antivirus scans, or indexing during benchmarking/critical workloads.
- Why it helps: Concurrent heavy I/O skews benchmarks and reduces effective throughput for target tasks.
- Consider hardware upgrades or drive configuration changes
- What to do: If your drive is the bottleneck, upgrade to a faster NVMe SSD or add RAID (for specific workloads). For laptops, use larger/faster SSDs; for desktops, move frequently used apps to a faster drive. Also check whether the motherboard’s slot shares lanes with other devices.
- Why it helps: Some workloads simply need higher bandwidth or lower latency that only newer hardware or different configurations can provide.
Quick verification steps after changes
- Rerun Nero DriveSpeed in identical conditions (same test size and single vs. multi-threaded settings).
- Record sequential vs. random read/write results separately.
- Compare before/after numbers and monitor for sustained IO vs. burst performance differences.
Safe defaults and caveats
- Back up important data before firmware updates or reconfiguring drives.
- RAID can improve throughput but has complexity and different fault characteristics.
- Real-world application performance may differ from synthetic benchmarks; prioritize fixes that match your typical workload (large sequential transfers vs. many small random reads/writes).
Follow these steps in order of simplicity and risk: update software/firmware and check settings first, then optimize space and background tasks, and finally consider hardware changes if needed.
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