Hard Disk Speeds

[Hozza007]

Can anyone tell me, does partitioning a hard drive effect the overall performance? or will that only happen if your trying to access 2 or more partitions at once.

Thanks

 

[TheCorm]

I don't think it makes a whole load of difference to be honest....in extended file searches it makes things quicker because you are searching less of the physical drive but it doesn't make the driver itself 'faster'

If you are say copying files from one partition to another it ain't terribly fast but logically should be faster than copying from one drive to another....I think.

Jamie

 

[draelon]

Partitioning will not affect hard drive speed.

If you are using FAT or FAT32, partitioning will allow you to reduce the sector size of your disk, which in turn means you will have more efficient storage on your drive.

For example, if your sector size on your drive is 16k, then any file that is 16k or less will take up 16k of space on your hard drive. In older OSes, the size of the hard drive limited your options when it came to choosing a sector size, so you would parition your drive into smaller chunks so that you could make smaller sector sizes. (I think 4k was the smallest sector size available)

These days with NTFS, sector size is basically irrelevant, so the main advantage of partitioning a drive is to allow you to organize your files better. I generally make a system partition (C drive), an apps partition (D drive and a data parition (E drive).

 

[Davegod]

i'd have thought it would be very little difference, even if you engineer it for worst-case scenario (i.e. due to the partitions the files are as far away as possible from each other, resulting in max movement of the head).

using two seperate hdd, especially if theyre on seperate channels (i.e. one on primary cable other on secondary ide cable), can have a noticable performance increase over reading->writing to the same hdd. more likely to notice it when you do the same with hdd and cdrom though, for example if youre installing a game from a cd to hdd it will be a touch quicker if theyre on seperate cables, and if music is playing from the cd at the same time it will stutter a lot less.

not a hugely important consideration, but if your building a new pc anyway it makes sense to setup this way - however minor the benefits its no extra effort or cost.