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Any advantages of creating a separate partition for data?

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professorman

Member
I have a freshly installed Win7 desktop PC on a 1TB hard drive. Is there any advantages to partitioning my hard drive to be like 256GB for Windows & programs and the rest for data storage?

Is there any speed advantages of doing this, rather than allowing windows to manage the my documents in the same partition?

I was drooling over a SSD, but I really do not have the extra cash for one, and the prices are dropping so fast and reliability is all over the place, I think I will stick with spinning drive until I can afford the SSD.

I am thinking, if I keep data separate, when I am ready to make the SSD plunge, I can just mirror that partition unto an SSD and be good to go (if it works, I HATE re-installations). What do you guys think?
 
Not really. Partitioning usually only leads to waste of space.

And I would recommend reinstall rather than try to clone your install.
 
Partitions primarily exist to help organize date. Your use case of creating an OS paritition for mirroring onto an SSD at a later date is a great use for paritions. Partitions can also make it easier to do formats on a disk and not use all your data.


One note about mirroring - do some research on the SSD sector size. I believe if you format with 4K sector size, you should be good. In general you don't want to have a mismatch in the SSDs "preferred" sector size, and your HDDs sector size. Also make sure the drive is aligned on a 4K sector.


Partitions do take up a small amount of space - but this is somewhat akin to saying that creating more folders takes up space. In general the amount of space you lose will be trivial.

As for speed, the only way that using partitions would be "faster" is if you located all your data on your on the outer most partitions and "short stroked" the drive. However if you place the OS on one paritions & data on the other, you may be slowing down the drive, as the time it takes to read from the OS partition and then a program on the other partition will make the drive head have to move farther than if the OS and data were stored together.


Wikipedia has a relatively good article describing paritions and the pro's and con's of them here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_partitioning .


TL&DR: Use paritions if you want to organize your data for backups & transfers. Just check alignment & sector size when mirroring.
 
ShintaiDK said:
Not really. Partitioning usually only leads to waste of space.

And I would recommend reinstall rather than try to clone your install.
Click to expand...

Nonsense.
There are very good reasons to partition big HDs.
For starters, it is much easier/faster to backup partitions than the whole drive. (As in, you only backup the stuff you really care about, not your games partition where you can reinstall those at any time)
It is easier to wipe the OS partition when windows goes belly up.
You can have multiple OSs installed (like linux, win7, win8...whatever) on different partitions.
And the list goes on...
 
I think the "waste of space" argument is based on the difficulty of trying to predict how big to make the OS partition.

It's like a moving target. You think initially you'll need X, then worry about cutting it too close so decide on 2X, and then after using the system for a year you realize you really only needed 0.5X and wasted 1.5X of space. Perhaps you realize this just as your other partition is filled to capacity, and wish you could easily resize the partitions (but wait, can't you nowdays, simply use a Linux bootCD with Gparted or whatever partition manager?).
 
http://superuser.com/questions/120809/how-can-i-determine-the-sector-size-on-an-external-hard-drive
^ sector size of hDD

When I had my 1TB HDD is the main drive, I had 100GB W7 OS, 100GB ubuntu, rest data

now, with my 96GB SSD, 64GB W7, rest ubuntu.... each partition backed up using clonezilla.... (data stored on other HDDs / cloud)

had windows being buggy on me on sunday, i restored the partition (writing to SSD 20GB of data @ 8GB/s = 5 minutes)... and I'm back up and running again... (without touching my linux partition.... if you had a data partition, that partition won't be touched too)
 
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Partitions are also great when running VMs. My hard drive doesn't get nearly as fragmented now that I have my VMs on a separate partition.
 
professorman said:
Is there any free partitioning software that can partition without destroying my current installation?
Click to expand...

Windows (vista/7) has that option in disk management, or gparted, or one of the many other ones can do it...

And for the sector size, just leave it default.
 
I prefer partitioning.

As has been said, I can reinstall the OS without issues. I can backup my data more easily.

And if you are worried about the moving target of partition size, there are several utilities that will resize your partitions without loss of data. I use EASEUS Partition Master now.
 
Elixer said:
Windows (vista/7) has that option in disk management, or gparted, or one of the many other ones can do it...

And for the sector size, just leave it default.
Click to expand...

Thanks! I did not realize that windows 7 now includes partitioning, Why do you guys use third part software if it can be done in windows 7? Is it perfectly fine to use Win7 for it, no hiccups?
 
I love partitions. I can wipe out my windows install and be back up and running in 5 minutes without worrying about my data.

Use symlinks for user folder for a truly hassle free reinstall.
 
professorman said:
Thanks! I did not realize that windows 7 now includes partitioning, Why do you guys use third part software if it can be done in windows 7?
Click to expand...
First, there is no "now"; every version of Windows and DOS (not certain of the DOS 1.0 though) has had a disk partitioninig tool.

Running an OS from a partition and then resizing that partition in that session is a "no go" in every OS that I know of. That is why tools on separate "Live" distros that run from removable media / ramdisk are convenient. Furthermore, third-party partitioning tools tend to support features not found from the Windows tool.
 
mv2devnull said:
First, there is no "now"; every version of Windows and DOS (not certain of the DOS 1.0 though) has had a disk partitioninig tool.

Running an OS from a partition and then resizing that partition in that session is a "no go" in every OS that I know of. That is why tools on separate "Live" distros that run from removable media / ramdisk are convenient. Furthermore, third-party partitioning tools tend to support features not found from the Windows tool.
Click to expand...

Interpreting this MS page, it seem that I can perform a live 'shrink' of the partition. The images show only one disk. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/gg309169.aspx


This howtogeek.com page seem to support the idea that windows 'now' has the built in functionality, and clearly state that there is 'no longer' the need for 3rd party partitioning utilities.

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/resize-a-partition-for-free-in-windows-vista/

Can anyone confirm if this is so?
 
KingFatty said:
I think the "waste of space" argument is based on the difficulty of trying to predict how big to make the OS partition.

It's like a moving target. You think initially you'll need X, then worry about cutting it too close so decide on 2X, and then after using the system for a year you realize you really only needed 0.5X and wasted 1.5X of space. Perhaps you realize this just as your other partition is filled to capacity, and wish you could easily resize the partitions (but wait, can't you nowdays, simply use a Linux bootCD with Gparted or whatever partition manager?).
Click to expand...

Yeah. I am a big fan of doing this at work with Acronis Disk Director.
 
Apparently Windows 7 natively supports shrinking partitions under disk management under "manage my computer"? I haven't tried it, but that's neat that you can mess with your partitions without even using another utility. though, I bet the windows tool for resizing partitions is not as flexible as a tool that runs under a boot disk without being run under the Windows OS.
 
ShintaiDK said:
Not really. Partitioning usually only leads to waste of space.

And I would recommend reinstall rather than try to clone your install.
Click to expand...

And that ends the example of how to be wrong and clueless. Now onto better observations.

Plenty of advantages.
1. Organization
2. Keeping what you use often on the faster parts of the drive
3. Easier and more direct scanning through antivirus/whatnot
4. Easier recovery and backup through programs like Acronis
5. Multiple OS
6. Etc
 
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