Does partitioning a drive increase performance?

[FishAk]

1. Don't put your pagefile on a separate partition. Your hard drive will constantly have to seek from wherever it was to the physical location of the page file, wasting time.

I disagree. I believe, if done correctly, putting the pagefile on a separate partition- even of the same physical drive- reduces head seek.


I prefer setting a partition for the page file on the very outside edge of the disk- moving the OS/program partition to the right enough to make room for it. Restricting the page file to it's own partition will reduce fragmentation. Putting it before the OS partition will reduce head movement, since there is virtually no space between the OS and the swap partition. Putting the page file after the OS will require the head to travel past the OS, past the installed programs, and past any empty space on the OS partition to reach the swap file, for each read. Leaving the page file inside the OS partition will require further head sweeps, due to the page data being allowed to be anywhere inside the relatively large OS partition.

2. My laptop at work has two partitions...data goes on one partition...the programs go on the other...

I do agree with this setup, but I wonder if you mean 3 partitions, with your OS separated from your programs. I would not agree with that.

Short story:

Don't friggin' bother.

This probably is the best advice, since it's the easiest, and the performance gain from the hard way is really not that much. A much bigger performance gain can be found elsewhere, such as an SSD.