I have a processor that is very strong and a hard drive that is very slow. I have installed a lot of heavy programs and IDEs on my system, on a laptop I had before if I had installed as many programs as I have done on this laptop then it would hang freeze and throw ARNs on every window I interact with. The processor of this laptop is a core i5-seventh generation and somehow, this system is very responsive despite the hard drive having very low read and write speeds(100MBs/s-100MB/s), I feel like this processor is making up for the slow hard drive with it's clock speed. Is this possible and can one hardware still boost system performance despite others in the system being weak, Thank you.
Performance – Can a Processor Compensate for Performance Drop Caused by a Hard Drive?
cpuhard driveperformance
Best Answer
No.
RAM can somewhat make up for a slow hard drive as it can be used as a buffer/cache (and is by default in most OS's including Windows) - and its the RAM most likely helping you here.
If waiting for disk IO consumes 98℅ of the time, no amount of clu procrssing power will make even 5℅ difference to the performance. On the other hand, the the computer is doing the same kinds of things repeatedly and can memorise the data on the drive (ie in RAM) it can greatly offset the slowness of the system.