Does Partitioning a HD slow it down?

[imported_savage]

Hi, I was thinking of partitioning my hd but I heard that if I do that, it's going to slow down my computer a lot. I just wanted to confirm with some ppl here in the forums if it's true or not. Also, what are some good programs that you guys would recommend for such a task, and can the partitioning be undone later if I change my mind?

Thanks

PS: I've never done anything like this before.

 

[HardcoreRobot]

not true, and if it is true, the difference is not noticeable

i recommend having a separate partition for your OS and installed programs. that way when you do a reinstall of the operating system you dont have to worry about backing up your files (presumably on the other partition)

 

[imported_savage]

Do you know of any good programs?
Can the partitioning be reversed later?

Thanks

 

[Nothinman]

Partitioning can cause slowdown because when data on both partitions are accessed seek times are increased creating lag in data access.

 

[sciencewhiz]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Partitioning can cause slowdown because when data on both partitions are accessed seek times are increased creating lag in data access.

no worse then if the data was across the disk in one huge partition.

 

[Algere]

No it won't slow it down. Having multiple partitions will actually speed things up since it won't take as long to search for files.

e.g. with 1 single partition, files for a program has to be searched throughout the entire hard drive before it can startup. When you have multiple partitions, files for that same program are more likely to be "bunched" together and not spread out across the entire hard drive which means it won't take as long to find/access the files needed to startup that program.

Then again I suppose that could be solved by defragging but by having multiple partitions, your hard drive's performance won't be as hindered from fragmentation in comparison to a single [bigger] partition.

 

[dderolph]

I agree with those who said it won't slow down your system. But no one has commented on your other question: can the partitioning be undone later? It depends on what software you use for partitioning. If you want to partition an existing installation of Windows, you need a third-party tool such as PartitionMagic. Without such a tool, i.e. if just using Microsoft tools, you would have to format and partition as part of the process of doing a fresh installation of your OS. If you wanted to change that without having a tool such as PartitionMagic, you would have to go through that whole process again and reinstall everything. But, you could install PartitionMagic on your existing system and create partitions without having to format and reinstall everything.


Edit: Of course, if you installed PartitionMagic, created new parititions, and want to move some programs to a different partition, you'll probably need to reinstall those programs so that Windows Registry is properly updated.

 

[Nothinman]

no worse then if the data was across the disk in one huge partition.

Sure it is. With 2 partitions you know data is spread across the disk, if it's one big partition it might be right next to each other. Also there's two filesystems to update, so if you make a change the heads have to seek to the other partition to get to the MFT or FAT, if there was 1 filesystem there would only be one table to update.

e.g. with 1 single partition, files for a program has to be searched throughout the entire hard drive before it can startup. When you have multiple partitions, files for that same program are more likely to be "bunched" together and not spread out across the entire hard drive which means it won't take as long to find/access the files needed to startup that program.

Do you have any idea how files are indexed in filesystems? If you have 1 big filesystem searching for a file is as simple as reading the MFT or FAT chain list from 1 filesystem, if there are two you have potentially twice as much data to read just to find the file, let alone read the file.

 

[Algere]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

e.g. with 1 single partition, files for a program has to be searched throughout the entire hard drive before it can startup. When you have multiple partitions, files for that same program are more likely to be "bunched" together and not spread out across the entire hard drive which means it won't take as long to find/access the files needed to startup that program.

Do you have any idea how files are indexed in filesystems? If you have 1 big filesystem searching for a file is as simple as reading the MFT or FAT chain list from 1 filesystem, if there are two you have potentially twice as much data to read just to find the file, let alone read the file.

If you wanna nitpick, then exchange (what I said) the word "searched" to "accessed" which is similar [to me] to when I said "find/access".

 

[Nothinman]

If you wanna nitpick, then exchange (what I said) the word "searched" to "accessed" which is similar [to me] to when I said "find/access".

It's not a nitpick, if a full seek costs 20ms that can cause noticable delays when jumping between partitions. Splitting the data up between partitions for no reason will most likely cause a performance drop, how you use the disk will determine how much the drop really is.

I try to avoid partitions as much as possible because there's little point in using them. Organizing data should be done with directories, not partitions. Splitting off user data from the OS is a benefit when you need to reload the OS so I do seperate /home even if I only have 1 disk, but otherwise I stick to 1 partition per drive whenever possible.

 

[Algere]

It's not a nitpick, if a full seek costs 20ms that can cause noticable delays when jumping between partitions. Splitting the data up between partitions for no reason will most likely cause a performance drop, how you use the disk will determine how much the drop really is.

& I suppose having your system seek for files back and forth throughout the entire drive is faster than having the drive accessing (or seeking) those same files within a certain section (partition) of a hard drive...

 

[Nothinman]

& I suppose having your system seek for files back and forth throughout the entire drive is faster than having the drive accessing (or seeking) those same files within a certain section (partition) of a hard drive...

Of course not, but it's less likely to seek so much with one filesystem because there's only one file table to access and update.

 

[Algere]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

& I suppose having your system seek for files back and forth throughout the entire drive is faster than having the drive accessing (or seeking) those same files within a certain section (partition) of a hard drive...

Of course not, but it's less likely to seek so much with one filesystem because there's only one file table to access and update.

I'll accept that to an extent although I suppose the question now (or was from the getgo?) is which is faster/better overall.


Ex. #1 (single partition)
C:\ OS*, program, multimedia, & document files

All this (O/S, programs, etc.) could be located from between the front of the hard disk to the very end. With 1 partition there's 1 indexed file list (unless there's a Windows backup). As to how much of a performance hit there is to having concurrent access to 2 indexed file list instead of 1, I don't know but I've had my experiences with both single and multiple partitions & from what I've found. When completely defragmented, the single partition "might" be faster (placebo?) IIRC than a multiple partition setup although too close to call IMO to really say for sure.

Ex. #2 (multiple partitions)
C:\ OS* + Microsoft related Program Files
D:\ Applications
E:\ Games
F:\ Documents
G:\ Multimedia

Out of this & of the type of partitioning I've used in the past. I find [in my experience] that most of the time the OS is fragmented the most, "Applications" & "Games" partition fragment (before it needs a defrag) now and again while the "Documents" & "Multimedia" partitions are rarely fragmented. Considering that the "OS" and "Documents" are one of the smaller partitions of them all. Defragging the OS partition as you can imagine won't take too long & not as long as doing an entire systemwide defrag.

* With or without the pagefile.


As to which decreases performance the most overall? Having a multiple partition setup that reads from 2 (or more?) indexed file lists instead of 1 [only if] @ the same time or a single partition setup which will more likely be affected by hard disk wide fragmentation. Overall I'd say fragmentation affects performance moreso than having to read more than 1 indexed file list concurrently or in other words, the pros of having multiple partitions outweighs its cons.

 

[Childs]

You don't partition for performance, you partition for other reasons. For most people there is no need for separate partitions. The only reason you'd want separate partitions theses days is to guarantee X amount of space at any give point in time, and since disks are big and cheap these days, there's no real reason to do it (aside from dual boot applications). 7+ years ago space was at a premium, so you didn't want logs filling up your disk, or you were going to set up a db that had its own filesystem. These days, a regular user has no real need to partition their disk, unless maybe that wanted to guarantee x amount of space was always available for swap. Performance difference should be minimal. If anything, you run the risk of underestimating the amount of space any given partition needed.

If you don't have a need aside from curiosity, you shouldn't fool around with your partitions with the expectations that something like Partition Magic will work without incident.

My $.02

 

[imported_savage]

So are there any good programs out there....free or not?

Thanks for all the input by the way

 

[Nothinman]

As to how much of a performance hit there is to having concurrent access to 2 indexed file list instead of 1,

The drive can only do one thing at a time (unless you have a SCSI drive which can queue events and reorganize them for speed) so the contention isn't on the disk, if anything it's in the OS and is irrelevant unless you have more than 1 CPU because on a UP box there's no way for 2 pieces of code to run concurrently.

As to which decreases performance the most overall?

Performance should be a secondary concern. What happens when G: gets filled up? Now you have to either repartition to make more room or start putting things that belong on G: on another partition and *poof* goes your organization out the window.

Directories are for organization, not drive letters.

Overall I'd say fragmentation affects performance moreso than having to read more than 1 indexed file list concurrently or in other words, the pros of having multiple partitions outweighs its con

Hardly. How often do you really think you read more than a few pages of data at a time? Unless you do a lot of audio/video work or just copy files around a lot, not very often. Data is paged in from the disk in pretty much random order so having a file contiguous on disk doesn't really matter much. For instance when you run a program a small chunk of the executable is paged into memory, then chunks of the libraries it's linked against. As the program executes more and more is paged in as necessary, this is called demand paging. Luckily shared libraries are shared in memory as well so common libraries like MFC are pretty much always in memory and the pagefaults are soft meaning only he page tables for that process need updated to point to the right location in memory. But the point is that there's no way you can make the execution path of the binary contiguous which might actually help performance in in a noticable way and even if you could you would end up hurting other applications that need the same libraries.

Add onto that the problem of managing partitions vs managing directories and having multiple partitions causes overhead than it's worth.

 

[imported_savage]

any recommendations as far as programs go for the job??????

by the way, i only want to partitions b/c i just had to reformat my pc and it wiped out my 2000+mp3's, and all my movies. Some of that stuff wasn't backed up, so I want to ensure it doesn't happen again.

 

[Emrys]

Originally posted by: savage
any recommendations as far as programs go for the job??????

by the way, i only want to partitions b/c i just had to reformat my pc and it wiped out my 2000+mp3's, and all my movies. Some of that stuff wasn't backed up, so I want to ensure it doesn't happen again.

Someone already mentioned partition magic-- that is what I use for the job and it seems to work well enough.

 

[dderolph]

I previously PartitionMagic. It's good. It's had a good reputation for years now.

 

[Nothinman]

by the way, i only want to partitions b/c i just had to reformat my pc and it wiped out my 2000+mp3's, and all my movies. Some of that stuff wasn't backed up, so I want to ensure it doesn't happen again.

Partitioning won't help you in many cases, you should be making some sort of backups.

 

[Algere]

The drive can only do one thing at a time (unless you have a SCSI drive which can queue events and reorganize them for speed) so the contention isn't on the disk, if anything it's in the OS and is irrelevant unless you have more than 1 CPU because on a UP box there's no way for 2 pieces of code to run concurrently.

Sounds like that's where we're heading (NCQ & dual core).

Performance should be a secondary concern. What happens when G: gets filled up? Now you have to either repartition to make more room or start putting things that belong on G: on another partition and *poof* goes your organization out the window.

Since this thread was originally posted about multiple partitions & performance one would think it was primarily about performance (or performance hit). I agree partially with what you said. Although it's one of a few cons to multiple partitions, it's not a major one [to me] since as mentioned, if you have programs like PartitionMagic, resizing (not repartitioning) partitions shouldn't be much of a chore and with hard drive storage capacity in plentiful supply these days (e.g. below 50 cents/GB) it's not like you'll need to resize a partition whenever it gets full often.

Hardly. How often do you really think you read more than a few pages of data at a time? Unless you do a lot of audio/video work or just copy files around a lot, not very often.

I don't know about that but I do know that when my hard drive is fragmented. Program startup crawls, file accessing slows down noticeably and to a further extent (depending on degree of frag.) program crashing occurs. So to decrease the performance effects of fragmentation. What do I do? For one thing I could waste time defragging my entire hard drive every so often or I can create multiple partitions to decrease the adverse affects of fragmentation that would otherwise in a single partition environment span across the entire hard drive/disk(s) & so with multiple partitions, fragmentation is isolated within a single partition while other partitions within the same physical hard drive are unaffected.

Add onto that the problem of managing partitions vs managing directories and having multiple partitions causes overhead than it's worth.

I've never had problems or "overhead" with multiple partitions that I can remember unless you mean copying/moving files from 1 partition to another since windows treats multiple partitions as if they were seperate [virtual] hard drives. Then again as mentioned in my previous post (Ex. 2), it doesn't look like I would transfer/copy files across partitions that frequently but I suppose it's a matter of what you do with your system.

Now I suppose I obviously don't see in your reasoning why anyone would decide to partition at all. Afterall short of actually buying another hard drive why would someone do it? For backup reasons perhaps e.g. a copy of a OS installation should one decide to reformat? Or heck if you do decide to reformat, with multiple partitions you wouldn't have to backup then restore your vast storage sucking collection of multimedia files onto spans of DVD discs or to the unfortunate soul, CD's... (Yea you could copy said files from 1 hard drive to another during a reformat of main partition but as mentioned, that's not an option)

New scenario! or perhaps an extention to the previous example , e.g. you have 3 partitions; OS + program files, multimedia, and backup OS installation. You're saying that by having 3 partitions, 1 to which is accessed rarely (backup OS install.) while another which only has to access 1 file at a time (MP3, WMV, etc.). Will cause much overhead, so much that it's not worth doing?

 

[Algere]

Originally posted by: Emrys

Originally posted by: savage
any recommendations as far as programs go for the job??????

by the way, i only want to partitions b/c i just had to reformat my pc and it wiped out my 2000+mp3's, and all my movies. Some of that stuff wasn't backed up, so I want to ensure it doesn't happen again.

Someone already mentioned partition magic-- that is what I use for the job and it seems to work well enough.

Ditto

 

[Nothinman]

Sounds like that's where we're heading (NCQ & dual core).

Doubtful, people still want big and cheap and drives with TCQ aren't cheap.

it's not a major one [to me] since as mentioned, if you have programs like PartitionMagic, resizing (not repartitioning) partitions shouldn't be much of a chore

I take it you've never had Partition Tragic fail on you yet?

and to a further extent (depending on degree of frag.) program crashing occurs

Fragmentation can not cause crashing. Unless you're stick in 10 years ago running Win95 or something, then anything can cause crashing.

For one thing I could waste time defragging my entire hard drive every so often or I can create multiple partitions to decrease the adverse affects of fragmentation that would otherwise in a single partition environment span across the entire hard drive/disk(s) & so with multiple partitions, fragmentation is isolated within a single partition while other partitions within the same physical hard drive are unaffected.

Or you could set it to run at night and not worry about it.

And excessive fragmentation is mainly a Windows problem, I run Linux with XFS and I never defragment my filesystems because there's no need. Sure there's fragmentation, but with things like read-ahead and the general layout of XFS there's pretty much no slow down over time. This Linux installation here is over 5 years old and I've defragmented it maybe 5 times at most, just f'ing around to see how long it would take and if there was any speed difference and there was nothing noticable.

The last two are pretty bad because of bittorrent, but even that fragmented I can't say I notice any slowdown.

actual 460608, ideal 459661, fragmentation factor 0.21% -- root filesytem on my workstation
actual 29517, ideal 22034, fragmentation factor 25.35% -- /home filesystem on my workstation
actual 149028, ideal 33728, fragmentation factor 77.37% -- a data drive
actual 62748, ideal 21966, fragmentation factor 64.99% -- another data drive

I've never had problems or "overhead" with multiple partitions that I can remember

Sure you have, you just probably didn't notice. I'm sure you didn't do time trials comparing a single partition to multiple. When you run a program from D the drive has to keep jumping back and forth between C and D because most Windows support libraries are on the system drive and the program and it's data are likely all on D. How much time it adds to the startup depends on the drive seek time, how far apart the partitions are, how far apart the data is, etc.

with multiple partitions you wouldn't have to backup then restore your vast storage sucking collection of multimedia files onto spans of DVD discs or to the unfortunate soul, CD's... (Yea you could copy said files from 1 hard drive to another during a reformat of main partition but as mentioned, that's not an option)

And what happens when you accidentally format the wrong partition? It happens to everyone that formats regularly eventually and it's a lot harder to do if you have more than one physical drive.

You're saying that by having 3 partitions, 1 to which is accessed rarely (backup OS install.) while another which only has to access 1 file at a time (MP3, WMV, etc.). Will cause much overhead, so much that it's not worth doing?

Of course not, that's like saying that adding a second sound card will slow games down because the OS has twice as many sound devices to look at.

But it's still largely pointless. The OS backup should be on a seperate media (tape, CD, DVD, etc) and your important data should be on another physical drive and probably also on a backup media like tape, CD, DVD, etc. If the OS backup you're talking about is a second installation for rescue purposes make a WinPE CD with Bart PE and kill that worthless partition.

 

[Algere]

Doubtful, people still want big and cheap and drives with TCQ aren't cheap.

I said that's where we're headed. Not where we're at right now

I take it you've never had Partition Tragic fail on you yet?

Not yet if ever

Fragmentation can not cause crashing. Unless you're stick in 10 years ago running Win95 or something, then anything can cause crashing.

It can/did in my case and on XP. I dunno maybe files were lost, took too long to access, or something but after a defrag (nothing else done to files) that same program worked fine.

Or you could set it to run at night and not worry about it.

Some ppl don't leave their computers on @ night. Something called electricity bills prevents them from doing so. Nor do some like working on a computer during a defrag.

And excessive fragmentation is mainly a Windows problem

Seeing that most PC users use Windows as their main OS for the time being...

Sure you have, you just probably didn't notice. I'm sure you didn't do time trials comparing a single partition to multiple. When you run a program from D the drive has to keep jumping back and forth between C and D because most Windows support libraries are on the system drive and the program and it's data are likely all on D. How much time it adds to the startup depends on the drive seek time, how far apart the partitions are, how far apart the data is, etc.

Previously said, it's something I don't remember or as you've said noticed esp. after personally comparing between single & multiple partitions of the same drives & files.

And what happens when you accidentally format the wrong partition? It happens to everyone that formats regularly eventually and it's a lot harder to do if you have more than one physical drive.

I label my partitions during creation of partitions & I do my formatting under XP's blue screen O/S setup (main partition formatting) & IIRC labels are displayed under said setup which also prompts to make sure if you want to delete a partition. I think something along the lines of (not exact) "Are you sure you wanna delete this partition?". Then again ppl just say yes to everything like they do with EULA's.

But it's still largely pointless. The OS backup should be on a seperate media (tape, CD, DVD, etc) and your important data should be on another physical drive and probably also on a backup media like tape, CD, DVD, etc. If the OS backup you're talking about is a second installation for rescue purposes make a WinPE CD with Bart PE and kill that worthless partition.

For the OS I'll give you that although some may disagree for whatever reason but anyways as Savage (OP) said, "2000+mp3's, and all my movies". With a possible storage capacity of in the 100+ GB capacity. Turning all of that into DVD/CD (popular media) takes time to "burn" let alone re-copy back into the hard drive.

Note that I'm not against removable storage backup but I am against restoring from DVD/CD or whatever that's not a hard drive* back into hard drive when I could just have created a seperate partition for those media files. Also not restoring from removable storage decreases wear & tear of that particular media from use albeit not much benefit.


* As I said, Multiple Partitioning: "Afterall short of actually buying another hard drive why would someone do it?" which is similar to "why spend money on more ram when you can use virtual memory".

 

[Algere]

The last two are pretty bad because of bittorrent, but even that fragmented I can't say I notice any slowdown.

actual 460608, ideal 459661, fragmentation factor 0.21% -- root filesytem on my workstation
actual 29517, ideal 22034, fragmentation factor 25.35% -- /home filesystem on my workstation
actual 149028, ideal 33728, fragmentation factor 77.37% -- a data drive
actual 62748, ideal 21966, fragmentation factor 64.99% -- another data drive

If that was the case for Windows (not Linux or other) users, why defrag at all? Heck I suppose Microsoft decided to integrate that utility into their OS for kicks.