How should I partition my 1TB drive

[blackrain]

I just put together an HTPC and am wondering how I should partition my new 1 TB drive. I have windows XP.

I know a lot of this is personal preference. I am looking to hear from practical experience that others might have had. I buy a lot of games. I also watch a lot of movies and will probably have a PVR at some point for movie TV recordings. And I will also keep a collection of home videos to watch on our HDTV thanks to a Canon HF100.

Any suggestions?

My inclination is to split it into thirds or into 2 halves. Or should I just make 1 full TB NTFS partition?

Also, any reason to do FAT32 on any of the partitions. I can't remember now whether there is a partition limitation for FAT32. I think FAT32 only has the limitation of 4GB file size.

 

[n7]

Purely IMHO or how'd i'd do it personally:

-OS + apps @ say ~50 GB or whatever size you think you'd need.
-Games @ say 150 GB or whatever size for them you'd need.
-Rest for storage.

I like having games on separate partition/drive if possible so if OS gets nuked, you can just re-image (if you use Acronis/Ghost/etc) your nice small OS parition quickly (or even reinstall if you don't do imaging).
And then still have the bigger game folders in tact (for those games that don't insist on writing saved games, etc. to C:\).

That said, i wouldn't really want vital stuff on the same physical drive as my OS...not something i'd consider ideal...

I was going to say don't use FAT32; use exFAT if you really want FAT for some reason, but you're on XP, so nevermind...just stick with NTFS.

 

[Blain]

C: 112GB - OS & Apps
D: 304GB - Videos
E: 263GB - MP3's & other audio
F: 21GB - Documents
G: 76GB - Downloads
H: 57GB - Email storage
I: 98GB - Saved games

That should just about wrap up your 1TB formatted capacity.

 

[blackrain]

The only thing that will really be vital are the home videos and I plan on archiving those all the time onto DVDs or bluray. HDs are just not reliable and I expect them to die at some point. For the most part, I wouldn't care if I lost the HD (other than having to start over on games). This setup is purely for entertaniment.

There won't be any documents or e-mail.

I will probably break it down into

C: 112GB (not too many apps expected, but just in case there are games that need to be installed on C:
D: 200GB (games)
E: 300GB (movies)
F: 300GB (home videos and more movies)

Or I might just do the home videos and movies on one single large partition


I do use Acronis for backup.


Thanks for both of your ideas

 

[Blain]

This should help :laugh:

 

[blackrain]

Originally posted by: Blain
This should help :laugh:

I guess this is a very common question

 

[Blain]

I have my WD 1TB "Black" partitioned up like this...
300GB C: OS & Apps
All the rest for storage

My 1TB is in a dedicated HTPC, so I'm only capturing, viewing, editing or deleting video.

 

[Nothinman]

I just put together an HTPC and am wondering how I should partition my new 1 TB drive. I have windows XP.

As few as possible. If you're worried about performance of recording shows while playing games and such you should probably get a dedicated drive for the recordings, that's the only way to really be sure things won't interfere.

 

[blackrain]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

I just put together an HTPC and am wondering how I should partition my new 1 TB drive. I have windows XP.

As few as possible. If you're worried about performance of recording shows while playing games and such you should probably get a dedicated drive for the recordings, that's the only way to really be sure things won't interfere.

I didn't even think about that. Guess I will have to get a dedicated HD for PVR later on down the road.

 

[blackrain]

Originally posted by: Blain
I have my WD 1TB "Black" partitioned up like this...
300GB C: OS & Apps
All the rest for storage

My 1TB is in a dedicated HTPC, so I'm only capturing, viewing, editing or deleting video.

Any particular reason you dedicated 300GB to the OS partition? I can't imagine having an OS and apps take up more than 100GB. Does it have something to do with the editing?

By the way, I forgot to mention that I will be editing the AVCHD on this PC as well (not just viewing). I guess it was implied but I want to be clear.

 

[Blain]

I keep my current videos on the 300GB partition and only drop them back to the other if I don't have time to edit them.

 

[sxr7171]

Why partition anything but maybe the OS drive (the only reason is to enable fast restores and reformats)? The only thing you achieve is artificially making the drive heads move to parts of the drive it otherwise would not need to go to.

I mean really a 1TB is a storage drive, fill it with storage. Get something different/better/faster for the OS drive and then you never have this problem of having the drive heads needing to move 300GB into the platter surface minimum to read any storage data while the same drive is responsible for reading and writing data to run your OS. So you just introduced all this extra drive head movement for nothing.

Imagine the machine writing to system logs and pagefile and you are playing some music from 300Gb away on the platter. What do you think is going to happen if you watched the drive heads? It would be moving to and fro your two partitions for no good reason.

Please, its about time we killed the partition myth just like we should also kill the megapixel myth.

The best: separate OS and storage drives

The compromises:

1. One partition with your OS and your storage data located in a folder (let your folders be your partitions) that allows you to easily backup your storage data before a reformat of the drive for reinstalling the OS. This is a pain to backup and restore I must admit.

2. Make a reasonable sized OS partition (maybe 32GB) and then format the rest as a storage partition. That way at least you don't have the drive heads traveling ~25% of the platter surface every time you read or write from your storage data.


This partitioning stuff is for people who can't get accept separation of data in folders, and have some need to see a different drive letter instead of different folder names. This comes from someone who used to have 8 partitions just to segregate data. It is stupid frankly, because what happens when your music partition for example is not big enough to hold all your music? You have a major Partition Magic (at least those days, I don't know what people use these days) exercise of resizing all your partitions just to accommodate this extra music. These processes take hours to complete as you reallocate space amongst your partitions. It's all a big waste of time for no performance benefit (in fact a degradation). It only makes sense for someone who is obsessed about about having a different drive letter for different data types. Folders do the same thing. Heck name your folders as if they are drive letters if it makes you feel better.

 

[blackrain]

So are you suggesting something like:

100GB O/S
831GB Games, movies, and home videos

(the total drive capacity is 931GB after formatting)

I am still trying to figure out how big my O/S drive needs to be. I don't know whether it is better to do video editing on the O/S drive or the storage drive. And I don't really know how much space I will need for games that insist on saving to the C: drive


Also, regarding this comment:

Imagine the machine writing to system logs and pagefile and you are playing some music from 300Gb away on the platter. What do you think is going to happen if you watched the drive heads? It would be moving to and fro your two partitions for no good reason.

Isn't that the case without or without a partition? Whether I partition or not, I am going to have stored files dispersed over 1 TB. The only way that can be eliminated is having two separate HDs

 

[Nothinman]

Isn't that the case without or without a partition? Whether I partition or not, I am going to have stored files dispersed over 1 TB. The only way that can be eliminated is having two separate HDs

But with 2 filesystems the system also has 2 MFTs to deal with (assuming NTFS) so there is additional seeking involved.

 

[sxr7171]

Originally posted by: blackrain
So are you suggesting something like:

100GB O/S
831GB Games, movies, and home videos

(the total drive capacity is 931GB after formatting)

I am still trying to figure out how big my O/S drive needs to be. I don't know whether it is better to do video editing on the O/S drive or the storage drive. And I don't really know how much space I will need for games that insist on saving to the C: drive


Also, regarding this comment:

Imagine the machine writing to system logs and pagefile and you are playing some music from 300Gb away on the platter. What do you think is going to happen if you watched the drive heads? It would be moving to and fro your two partitions for no good reason.

Isn't that the case without or without a partition? Whether I partition or not, I am going to have stored files dispersed over 1 TB. The only way that can be eliminated is having two separate HDs

Right but you created an artificial blank area over which it must traverse which is equal to the amount of unfilled space on your OS partition.

An OS drive doesn't need to be big, any size Velociraptor will do even older ones of 74GB. You could still install at least a dozen games that insist on installing to the C: drive. As for video editing, anyone would prefer video data coming from a different drive than the OS drive. Modern 1TB drives are pretty fast (except the WD Green Power drives).

 

[blackrain]

Originally posted by: sxr7171

Originally posted by: blackrain
So are you suggesting something like:

100GB O/S
831GB Games, movies, and home videos

(the total drive capacity is 931GB after formatting)

I am still trying to figure out how big my O/S drive needs to be. I don't know whether it is better to do video editing on the O/S drive or the storage drive. And I don't really know how much space I will need for games that insist on saving to the C: drive


Also, regarding this comment:

Imagine the machine writing to system logs and pagefile and you are playing some music from 300Gb away on the platter. What do you think is going to happen if you watched the drive heads? It would be moving to and fro your two partitions for no good reason.

Isn't that the case without or without a partition? Whether I partition or not, I am going to have stored files dispersed over 1 TB. The only way that can be eliminated is having two separate HDs

Right but you created an artificial blank area over which it must traverse which is equal to the amount of unfilled space on your OS partition.

An OS drive doesn't need to be big, any size Velociraptor will do even older ones of 74GB. You could still install at least a dozen games that insist on installing to the C: drive. As for video editing, anyone would prefer video data coming from a different drive than the OS drive. Modern 1TB drives are pretty fast (except the WD Green Power drives).

I don't expect the O/S partition to be too big. However, since this was a budgeted build, I can't spend on another HD. Is this really going to significantly impair my system or HD?

Oh how I wish I had a spare SATA drive.


Edit: I can migrate the O/S to separate drive in about 6 months to a year. For now, will there be significant impact from proceeding as is?

 

[blackrain]

 

[sxr7171]

No there will not be, not night and day. Just partition a reasonable 50GB or less space and make a storage partition with the rest. One thing you have to budget for in budgeted builds is backup space. But in 6 months to a year that's what I would be looking to do first.

 

[pjkenned]

I hate to say it, but with 1TB, if you really wanted to, just make 1 partition. At most, make two (one OS/application one storage). Backup like crazy. Using partitions on the same disk to try to preserve data integrity is much less efficient than just doing regular backups. I was an avid Norton partition magic user until I realized that having too many partitions is more trouble than it is worth as you end up needing to re-adjust partitions as one partition fills well before the others. One partition is not best practice, but if you have a great backup situation, it lets you use an entire hard drive instead of having to repartition, or even worse, storing 300GB of video on the "Video" partition and storing another 30gb on the OS partition.

So, that being said and as was mentioned above, drives will fail. Backups are always good to have, partition optimization doesn't pay off nearly as much.

 

[elconejito]

I wouldn't advise partitioning. Just leave it as one big drive.

If you partition a big enough space where you won't have to worry about your C drive filling up, let's say 100 or 200GB then like sxr7171 said, you've introduced a lot of unnecessary drive head movement. How much of a performance hit will you see? I don't know. Maybe it can even be mitigated by not doing certain things at the same time (like don't listen to music while you're editing a video). You'd have to try and see.

If you keep a small partition say 50GB, then you'll have to worry about the C drive filling up at some point. What about scratch files that your programs make up, in addition to windows page file? Lots of programs require a minimum amount of space on the C drive. Then you'd have to resize your partitions.

The only real reason I can think of to partition is to keep your OS/apps separate from your data in the event of a reinstall. And there is merit to that. But if you have a drive failure, the whole drive is gone anyway partitioned or not. Not worth it in my book, but to each his own.