HD Tune includes a particularly easy-to-use short stroking test feature that shows you how performance would change if you were only using a portion of the disk.
For our sample, the first 160 GB were obviously the fastest parts, making that a reasonable short-stroked restriction:
You can see that not using the whole disk range using short stroking considerably decreases worst-case seek time, which makes it particularly appropriate for applications that are more concerned about worst-case latency than disk capacity. And, in some cases, you may discover that SATA disks with very high capacities end up being much closer in ...
