Do not partition the hard drive

[SparkyJJO]

I partition partly out of habit and also if I reload windows due to major hardware overhaul or whatever but still keep my HD most my stuff is already "backed up" - I just copy the my docs to D: then hit the nuke button on C:. Also I keep my games and such on D: because windows doesn't fragment other logical drives the same as it does on C: because it isn't doing all the file swapping so it keeps them running smoothly.

 

[gsellis]

Originally posted by: Tostada
If you really want to get picky, everybody would probably benefit from having 64KB clusters on all their drives. Drives are large enough that you would have to have truly massive numbers of tiny files for the slack to become the slightest bit of a problem (and I think if files are under 4K they just reside in the MFT). I was just looking at my C: analysis report and was surprised that my average filesize is 630KB with 34,983 files, my D: drive average filesize is 5MB for 39,694 files, and my E: drive average filesize is 26MB for 2,001 files. So switching to 64KB clusters would be reducing overhead by 16X and not use much more space. I think most RAID0s use 64KB stripes, and other things get unhappy if you try to actually use the max 256KB clusters, so you might not want to go over 64KB.

I use 64k clusters, but then again, I have 10-25GB files.

One thing I never worked out was ideal block size and efficiency. Mem blocks are still 4k, I think (oh, a rust part of the brain.) In ancient times (the 80's), if file block = program block = data block, read and write had less overhead. In fact, in TPF, we had fixed block sizes for all, so the OS did not have to 'fit' the data by testing size and allocating size based on the block of data. Saved CPU cycles. This would a question for David Solomon, "is it any difference to have file block sizes the same as page size?" I think the answer is "we don't care."

 

[Auric]

File system cluster sizes have defaults and options. Windows 5.x NTFS default is 4KB and generally small enough while any larger disallows advanced features so is suitable for the OS partition. However, 64KB is better suited to performance for a seperate media/game/archive/etc. partition and capacity waste is insignificant. Such a seperate partition makes OS image backups small and quick to disc or alternatively to the seperate partition as well. The entire HDD can still be cloned but perhaps not as frequently. In any case the easy OS backups promote doing so frequently and "formatting" becomes entirely unneccesary as complete recovery is only 5 minutes away whether restored from image or even in the case of drive failure the physical replacement with the clone. Games installed on "D:" can very easily have their config files and exported registry keys likewise copied to "D:" so that even if a new OS setup was desired for some reason (as opposed to restored image or repair), re-installation of games would be unnecessary. A couple or three seperate partitions also makes defragmenting quicker. So there are indeed numerous reasons to partition and it certainly does not have to mean going to extremes to minimize wastage on tidgy drives as in in ye olden days.

 

[Tostada]

I don't know of any "advanced features" you have to worry about being disabled by changing the cluster size of your OS partition. Sure, folder compression doesn't work, and Win2K couldn't use the built-in defragmenter with clusters larger than 4KB, but I don't know of any legitimate problems.

Unless you actually think folder compression is a good thing to have on your C: drive...

Regardless, even though larger clusters are better, I haven't seen any benchmarks showing any significant performance improvement (and I'm certainly too lazy to do them on my own).

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Tostada
In what way do games create heavy fragmentation?

A lot of modern games pack a whole lot of their data into very large 'cab' files (or other sorts of concatenated file formats) -- so instead of having a zillion tiny little files each holding one texture/sound/model/whatever, you'll have 3 or 4 HUGE files that hold all the textures/sounds/models/whatever for the game/mod. Unless you have a lot of contiguous free space on the partition where you install the game, these files tend to get heavily fragmented during installation. However, I don't think games generally cause *more* fragmentation once they are installed, since they're not usually creating new files or expanding the existing ones.

Like I said, the way partitioning can increase performance is by essentially short-stroking your drive and keeping the most accessed stuff in the beginning area of the drive with the higher transfer rate. So, if you make two partitions and keep the games/apps/OS in the first one, you'll ensure that these things are all in the fastest part of the drive.

I don't think it's worth trying to do this JUST for the slight performance difference you may see -- but yes, you can theoretically reduce your average seek time by placing the most frequently accessed data together and putting it on the 'fastest' part of the disk. Of course, if you are doing something like playing an MP3 file from another partition while playing your game, you lose the benefit (and in this case it might be better to have just one big partition!)

It's nice to keep your OS on its own partition to make it easier to do a total wipe and a clean install, but if you format your C: drive, you're going to need to reinstall your games anyway, so there's no reason not to keep your games on the same partition as the OS.

If you do a total wipe/install, yes, you'll probably have to reinstall your apps. You should be able to salvage them if you restore to an image that was saved after the apps were installed, though.

Keeping games on a separate partion from the OS is slower (if they still reside on the same physical drive) because the head has to travel between partitions. For example, you said you have a 15-20GB partition for the OS. XP probably takes up about 2GB of that. All the empty space on the OS partition is just sitting there, and the head has to travel across it whenever you go from acessing OS files to accessing game data.

Yeah, but generally you're not accessing both at once.

In the end, it makes very little difference, but if you want to get technical you should keep all your stuff that you want to be able to access quickly in the first partition of the drive.

:thumbsup:

Partitioning is really mostly beneficial if you want to keep things that need performance (OS/games) on the same drive as random bulk storage (MP3s, ISOs, backups, things that don't matter). Then you keep from having the two intermingled. That is, when you install a new game, you don't want it placed on far end of a bunch of DVD images.

You could also just defragment (ideally with something like Norton Speed Disk that tries to do some optimization in terms of placement) every now and then.

 

[Tostada]

Originally posted by: Matthias99
You could also just defragment (ideally with something like Norton Speed Disk that tries to do some optimization in terms of placement) every now and then.

So, do you actually have a high opinion of this (or any other 3rd party defragmenters)?

I've never really heard much one way or another about this type of thing. Does it really do a better job than XP? And can it handle clusters larger than 4K?

I guess I've just never thought much of anything by Norton, just because every time I see some totally clueless person's sad computer, it has 9 billion things in the system tray, one of which is always Nortan Anti Virus, which is 2 years out of date and doing absolutely nothing but slowing down the machine.

Say I was extremely bored and wanted to run some benchmarks of how much this stuff matters... Is the new Partition Magic the only thing that can change cluster size?

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Tostada

Originally posted by: Matthias99
You could also just defragment (ideally with something like Norton Speed Disk that tries to do some optimization in terms of placement) every now and then.

So, do you actually have a high opinion of this (or any other 3rd party defragmenters)?

Speed Disk (at least the one from a few years ago; I haven't tried Systemworks '05/06) actually works pretty well. I don't know how well the optimizing actually works, but it's a pretty solid defragmenter.

I've never really heard much one way or another about this type of thing. Does it really do a better job than XP? And can it handle clusters larger than 4K?

It seems to be more aggressive than the bundled WinXP one (which doesn't try too hard to make your free space contiguous), and I believe it does handle large cluster sizes (but I have not personally tried it).

I guess I've just never thought much of anything by Norton, just because every time I see some totally clueless person's sad computer, it has 9 billion things in the system tray, one of which is always Nortan Anti Virus, which is 2 years out of date and doing absolutely nothing but slowing down the machine.

To be fair, that's not really Norton's fault. In my experience, NAV does actually work pretty well, though it can be a bit high in overhead.

Say I was extremely bored and wanted to run some benchmarks of how much this stuff matters... Is the new Partition Magic the only thing that can change cluster size?

Not sure... don't mess around with it very much.