I’m using older hard drives I have lying around , win 11 works ok but it gets confusing ,LOL
Your loosing a ton of speed every time it switches heads, cylinders and waits for sectors. And as files get closer to the center, it gets slower and slower.
Get a good Solid State Drive with some write caching on it and clone that sucker out. You need an SSD as big as your hard drive or I would recommend no lower than 250GB.
That system probably doesn't have more NVMe capabilities where Windows 11 is headed, but you will notice a Huge performance improvement by going to an SSD if you don't have NVMe capabilities in the BIOS.
Beyond this do a lot of performance tweaks you would have done for Windows 10 with an SSD and Windows 10 alone. Set Advanced System settings to Performance and get rid of the fancy animation and other stuff. Turn off the monitoring by MS under Privacy, Inking etc. Turn off reporting to MS unless you are part of the Windows Insider program.
For SSDs, I always recommend no scheduled optimization. That's only for Hard Drives. I turn off windows indexing and search (now known as sysmain).
I don't use XBOx gaming so I turned that off as well.
I would advise the same on Windows 10 for anyone with an SSD as C:
But I'm expecting to see any performance gains in 11 to be from the NVMe as C: drive. It bypasses the disk controller chip and routes directly to memory over PCIe version 3 and even better with version 4.
Efforts though Direct Storage is supposed to take compressed graphics directly from NVMe as memory directly into the GPU for decompression and use. This is suppose to help gamers a lot as this again bypasses the CPU.
The M.2 NVMe drives has two channels to memory. So if your system has two memory cards in Dual Mode (usually the same vendor). Then the NVMe drive can be twice as fast to memory. The architecture planned for up to 64 channels.
With M.2 Dual Channels, two Cores can be talking to the NVME drive at the same time.
I'm looking for a Dual M.2 system that can handle 2 NVME drives with Hardware write caches. I'll bet it would be awesome when copying files between them and etc. I've learned that most NVMe drives have hardware write cache about 1% of the total capacity. Thus for a 1TB drive that would be 1GB at speeds of up to 16 GB per second.
NVMe drives by themselves when operating beyond the cache. The read and write speeds over PCIe 4 are vastly better than SSDs. Before with an SSD my read speed was 400MB/Sec (benchmarked). With the NVMe drive it is 3264MB/Sec. Random reads and writes are in the 14 GB arena.
I think the NVMe capabilities are just now being explored and the Operating systems are just starting to use it effectively. I'm wondering if virtual memory still thinks it is on a Disk Drive these days. With NVMe it could just see it as another block of Memory!
Njoy