Is there any "Best way" to format or partition a large hard drive?

GullyFoyle

Diamond Member
Dec 13, 2000
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OK, so I have a 1.5 Terabyte drive arriving tomorrow. Samsung F2EG 5400 RPM SATA, internal Hard Drive. I'm going to use it for secondary file storage, MP3's, compiled DVD's, downloads, etc., not for programs. Formatted NTFS under Windows XP Pro.

Is there any "best" way to set it up? Should I just format it as one big drive? Partition it in to three 500 GB sections? Is one way any more efficient than the other?

My existing drive is 500 GB / 7200 RPM and will be used for booting, and programs.

Google seems to return mostly information about software used to perform the process, not the best way to set it up. Also, I don't see any FAQ's here in the forum.

Thanks for any help you can offer.
 

ilkhan

Golden Member
Jul 21, 2006
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Theres no "best" way. Many people recommend separate partitions for OS/programs and data, but if you have 2 drives thats already been taken care of. Go one big partition and don't worry about it.
 

GullyFoyle

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Dec 13, 2000
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Originally posted by: Emulex
make sure you align the partition if using an old o/s like xp pro.

Could you expound on "align the partition"? What does that mean?
 

ZetaEpyon

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Jun 13, 2000
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If you're just using it for storage, I don't see why you need any more than one large partition.
 

VirtualLarry

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Aug 25, 2001
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Originally posted by: Emulex
make sure you align the partition if using an old o/s like xp pro.

On a magnetic disk? There's no reason to align unless you are running RAID.
 

GarfieldtheCat

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Jan 7, 2005
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The only thing I would do is to have two partitions, one for OS/apps and one for storage.

That way, if you need to reinstall your OS, your data isn't on the same partition. This is just for ease of use, there are no speed benefits.
 

BushLin

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Oct 28, 2008
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Originally posted by: GarfieldtheCat
That way, if you need to reinstall your OS, your data isn't on the same partition. This is just for ease of use, there are no speed benefits.

Not strictly true, a hard drive is fastest at the first partition/first part of the disk and slowest at the end so if you were running applications from the drive using the first partition on the disk for that would have minor benefits to performance.
 

Nothinman

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Sep 14, 2001
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Not strictly true, a hard drive is fastest at the first partition/first part of the disk and slowest at the end so if you were running applications from the drive using the first partition on the disk for that would have minor benefits to performance.

Minor, being the key word.
 

Nothinman

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Sep 14, 2001
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And that might be relevant if you do a lot of huge, contiguous streaming reads but most people's normal usage doesn't have I/O patterns like that.
 

GullyFoyle

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Dec 13, 2000
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I formatted my drive as one partition. Thanks for the input guys. :beer:
Feel free to continue discussing the issue for the benefits of others.
 

yh125d

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Dec 23, 2006
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Most people don't have I/O patterns like that, but I do. 2TB external full of blu ray rips at 20gb+ means a lot of large sequential I/O
 

Nothinman

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Sep 14, 2001
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Most people don't have I/O patterns like that, but I do. 2TB external full of blu ray rips at 20gb+ means a lot of large sequential I/O

Even with that you don't need ~200MB/s to watch a BD rip.
 

yh125d

Diamond Member
Dec 23, 2006
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No but when you're copying 900gb of data on the inner part of the platters to your backup it's definitely appreciated.
 

ElBurro

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Feb 27, 2009
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Originally posted by: GarfieldtheCat
The only thing I would do is to have two partitions, one for OS/apps and one for storage.

That way, if you need to reinstall your OS, your data isn't on the same partition. This is just for ease of use, there are no speed benefits.

I agree here. I'm a believer in having a seperate partitions for data, OS, and apps but in reality there is little benifit in doing so. Except for the above mentioned not disturbing you data when you do a OS reinstall. Then again if you have a good backup you can easily restore data if something goes wrong.
 
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Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
Originally posted by: Emulex
make sure you align the partition if using an old o/s like xp pro.

On a magnetic disk? There's no reason to align unless you are running RAID.

Care to explain why Vista, Server 2008, and Win7 ALL partition do proper partition alignment? I feel the exact opposite, there's no reason to align.

I partition align all my partitions with 2048K or 1 meg offset (Vista and Server 2008 default), and then format non OS drives with 64K File Allocation Unit Size (vs the 4096 byte default). The space you lose on large drives nowadays is miniscule and worth the extra performance.

Diskpar is what I use and it's easy once you've done it once or twice.