HDD Partition and Page File??

[cwalker2000]

I have read so many different opinions on using mulitiple partitions on your HDD. Some things I do not understand.

1. If your OS is on its own partition and gets messed up, when you format and fresh install the OS, you will still need to reinstall ALL of your Apps, even if they are on a seperate partition, to put the entries back in the registry.

2. Page File. From what I gather, the placement of the Page File from best to worst:

Separate HDD on Separate IDE Cable
Separate HDD on Same IDE Cable
Different Partition on Same HDD as everything
Same Partition on Same HDD as everything

Can someone recommend any good articles and benchmark info on my above comments? Is the real world performance difference worth using Non Raid Multiple HDD??

 

[Nothinman]

1. If your OS is on its own partition and gets messed up, when you format and fresh install the OS, you will still need to reinstall ALL of your Apps, even if they are on a seperate partition, to put the entries back in the registry.

Not really. I used to have a ton of apps that worked fine after a format without a reinstall.

2. Page File. From what I gather, the placement of the Page File from best to worst:

Separate HDD on Separate IDE Cable
Separate HDD on Same IDE Cable
Different Partition on Same HDD as everything
Same Partition on Same HDD as everything

I would list them in this order:

Separate HDD on Separate IDE Cable
Separate HDD on Same IDE Cable
Same Partition on Same HDD as everything
Different Partition on Same HDD as everything


The reason you want it on the same partition as everything else if you must stick it on the same physical disk is seek time. Seek time is what kills peformance on most drives, and if you put it on it's own partition you just increase seek time required to access it. The best thing to do if you only have 1 drive is to leave it on the Windows partition but set the minimum size to 1.5-2x your physical memory size and set the maximum to unlimited, this way in the normal case it's in the middle of everything so seek time isn't killed by jumping between partitions and it doesn't fragment anything because it's not growing all the time. But because the max is so large if something does go wrong it can expand as much as it needs and nothing will crash because you've run out of pagefile space.

Can someone recommend any good articles and benchmark info on my above comments?

Benchmarks are evil. There are a ton of cases where things run great in benchmarks but suck in real use. I've seen number patches for the Linux kernel that were submitted to make something like dbench churn out great results but the patch also makes normal use slower because it's optimized for a specific pattern of use that only dbench shows.

If the box doesn't feel slow to you, don't f' with it. You'll just end up breaking something.

 

[EeyoreX]

1. If your OS is on its own partition and gets messed up, when you format and fresh install the OS, you will still need to reinstall ALL of your Apps, even if they are on a seperate partition, to put the entries back in the registry.

Not really. I used to have a ton of apps that worked fine after a format without a reinstall.

May I ask what kind of applications? because any application that puts any entry into the registry will need to be reinstalled after a new install of Windows, regardless. If the program does not add to/modify the registry than you are fine. Applications such as MS Office, Symantec software, disk utlities all modify the registry and will need these modifications to function properly.

IMHO, the best benchmark is the "How does it work when I am using it" benchmark. If it does what I need it to do fast enough, it's fine. If not, there is a problem somewhere.

\Dan

 

[Nothinman]

May I ask what kind of applications? because any application that puts any entry into the registry will need to be reinstalled after a new install of Windows, regardless. If the program does not add to/modify the registry than you are fine. Applications such as MS Office, Symantec software, disk utlities all modify the registry and will need these modifications to function properly.

ActivePerl (just needs put back in the PATH)
CuteFTP
FlaskMPEG
TMPGEnc
VirtualDub
VobMerge
WinRAR
WinZIP
Winamp
cygwin
gimp
graphedit
mozilla
putty
winimage
xchat

Most things recreate any registry keys they need when they run, like WinRAR readds itself to the context menus, and sure things like MS Office need reinstalled, but I don't use Office and there's a lot of software that doesn't. I havn't checked out OpenOffice for Win32 to see if it needs reinstalled or not, I just don't use Windows that often any more. There was 1 or 2 apps that absolutely needed to store their settings in the registry, so I exported them to a file and import that file to restore the settings after a OS reinstall.

 

[EeyoreX]

I exported them to a file and import that file to restore the settings after a OS reinstall.

Forgot to suggest that, as that'll certainly work too.

\Dan