There are a couple options, getting a faster hard drive, (lower seek time, higher disk speed...), make sure the disk has been "defragmented" recently, and if you really need to get some performance, try disk "striping". That should get you some speed when dealing with larger files.
Replacing the hard drive with a SSD (Solid state drive) would improve performance.
speeding up applications by clumping file components together
Yes possibly
Defragment your hard drive. Be careful though...
Do a Defrag. and a Disc clean-up
A larger hard drive will increase the overall speed and performance of your computer.
The three most notable things that hard drive performance will effect is:The start up time of your computer. As the information need to run the OS must be transferred from the hard drive to the systems RAM.The start up time of programs.If you are using almost all of your RAM space the system will use your hard drive to store information normally keep in RAM. In this case your hard drive performance will effect your entire system, but more ram will correct this problem better then a faster hard drive.
Installing a second hard drive in your system will have an immediate impact on system performance if your system is memeory bound?
S.M.A.R.T. System
Hard drives can make a big difference in computer performance. Consider a solid-state drive if you need quick drive access.
A disk defragmenter.
saving user requests on its hard drive.