Advantages Of Partitioning Your Hard Drive?

[Antoneo]

I have a 13 gig 5400 rpm WD hard drive. I am planning to upgrade to win2k and was wondering if I should just leave it as one big partition or split it. If I partition my hard drive, is the only benefit decreased access time? Are there any other advantages?

 

[VBboy]

Who said anything about the decreased access time?..

I usually have one partitions for Windows with all its installed programs, and another one for MP3, video, backups and downloads. This way, you only have to scan the main partition for viruses or to check for disk errors. The other partition is mostly for "data"..

 

[Jen]

I use one partition for system and rest for storage. This way if system fails I dont lose my other stuff on a install


Jen

 

[FlippyBoy]

i always have at least two partitions for two reasons. one, is if/when i have to re-install windows, then i can simply format my c: drive without having to worry about all my data. second reason is it wastes less space, because the smaller the partition is, the smaller the clusters are.

 

[Bovinicus]

It's good to put your OS on one partition at the beginning of your harddrive and everything else on the rest. Also, keep your page file on that partition. That will allow your harddrive to access the information it needs most often faster. Also, harddrives have higher sustained transfer rates at the beginning of the harddrive. Sometimes 2x the transfer rate or maybe more.

 

[Davegod]

theres an anandtech faq on this but its not all correct! for a start, on bigger drives a big benefit from partitions is quicker defrag. a further point is its said that partitioning doesnt make it faster, this is rubbish if you have lots of programs and files installed, teh faq on FAT's even points out that with thousands of files on one disk "FAT32 slows to a crawl".

also he says if you reinstall windows you have to reinstall all your other programs anyway, not true as you can backup your registry!

having said that, the hassle is a pain so like the others i stick to having one partition for programs and the other for data (actually i put games on 2nd partition too as they have no problem running from there and shares out the files a bit better).

 

[majewski9]

I have a 60 gig and I partioned mine. A 55 gig and a 5 gig. I left the 5 gig unformatted but now I cant seem to find the 5 gigs.

 

[Antoneo]

<< Who said anything about the decreased access time?.. >>


Hmm... I am pretty sure having multiple partitions decreases the amount of time the head spends looking for data on a particular area(s) of the hard drive. Anyone know for sure?

 

[Hector13]

<< also he says if you reinstall windows you have to reinstall all your other programs anyway, not true as you can backup your registry! >>



And what about any dll files installed by a program? I honestly don't believe you can install your os (speaking of windows here) on a seperate partition from your programs and hope to be able to just reinstall windows without having to reinstall your progams. Jeez, just the hassle of recreating all of your links would be enough for me to reinstall the programs. Plus, the mere fact that you are formatting your windows partition means there is probably something wrong with your registry anyways, so what good is a backup of it?

In any case, the most convenient part of multiple partitions is being able to defrag them seperately.

 

[jere01]

Does it hurt your HD to format it several times?

 

[BFG10K]

also he says if you reinstall windows you have to reinstall all your other programs anyway, not true as you can backup your registry!

Not only that but most programs (especially games) will continue to work perfectly well after a Windows reinstall.

 

[thraxes]

I have partition mania

7GB for my system
25GB for video editing and work
60GB (one entire drive) for misc data and FTP shares
8GB for MP3z
18GB for Games and unimportant crap

 

[Antoneo]

<< Does it hurt your HD to format it several times? >>


I don't believe it does... there is no increased amount of wear and tear because of formatting i think. I have formatted many times on this hard drive and it has yet to fail.

 

[audiophan]

<< 8GB for MP3z >>



lol! i remeber back in the day, now it's like 20gb

 

[FlippyBoy]

the only reason i can think of for re-installing windows is when it gets too bloated with crap. the last thing i wanna do is bring back my old registry with a fresh, new install. i just consider re-installing all my software part of re-instaliing windows. for whats its worth, i stopped having to re-install wiondows with win2k. no more win9x for me.

 

[SUOrangeman]

If you are only running one OS, then partitioning is by no means a necessity. As others have mentioned, it may help a little if you have your personal files, MP3s, downloads and such separated from the OS partition.

Since I'm trying to install my 7th OS on a 40GB drive, I've become very friendly with PartitionMagic and its counterparts.

-SUO