One really big partition or lots of little ones?

[Arcanedeath]

I'd do 3 one for the OS / swap, one for games / programs / downloads and the rest for static storage

 

[Ornery]

Originally posted by: Oyeve

Originally posted by: Ornery
"...what's the point of partitions when you got folders?"

They can segment the HDD, so that swap files, cache files, and other files that need to be accessed quickly are kept at the outside edge of the disc, which is the quickest to read from. It also separates your archived files, from files that are constantly changing, and at risk of corruption and cross links.

Its still the same physical HD. Corruption and crossinks can happen anyway. I see no benefit on partitioning a HD. As far as your statement regarding the outside disc speed, I think that with the speed of todays HDs its a moot point and would probably yield no real benefit. The only reason I WOULD partition a 400gb HD is for a quick restore of the OS. So in his case I would make a 60 gig partition just for the OS and put everything on the other partition in proper folders: games, music etc. I would also ghost the OS partition onto DVD for fast restore. On my system I have 6 HDs, the smallest one being 200gigs. Each HD has a single partition and funtion. IE, The fastest drive has the OS, the largest drive has all my games, the next largest has my music and pics, and so on. The smallest HD has just a bunch of crap that I have been transfering from PC to newer PC to newer PC from way back in the early 80s! .

When my PC gets shut down by a power failure, the chdsk, crosslinked and truncated files are almost always found on my swapdisk partion, which is on my second physical hard disk. No other files on that disk are ever involved, and that's reason enough for a special partition, let alone the speed advantage of the outer edge of the drive. Why do you suppose newer defrag programs ALWAYS put your swapfile there?

Hell, it takes less time to partition a disk, then it did to read this post, so I'd like to know exactly what the disadvantages are? Shoot, I forgot about the quicker defrag issue, which is a huge advantage. Why thrash 100GB of data when only a few gigs are in need of defragging?

 

[imported_NoGodForMe]

I have my 73 gig drive split in half.

C drive for the OS.
D drive for games, music, data files.
If the OS gets hosed, I can restore the C drive only.

Yes, we know drives have these things called folders. But when using tape backup software, it makes things easy to just select the C drive and start the backup.

 

[Jojo7]

Originally posted by: Ornery
No other files on that disk are ever involved, and that's reason enough for a special partition, let alone the speed advantage of the outer edge of the drive.

Why is the outer area of the disk faster? I think your logic is backwards. If you think about it, if the data is on the inner portion of the drive, the head can pick up data faster since the tracks are smaller.

I could be wrong though.

Edit: Nm. Yep. I did some research. I'm wrong-o.