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partition or not to partition that is the question

A

alfietooch

Member
40 gig 7200 baracuda... for basic ms office use , surfing, a little video editing and cd playing.. how should i partition this??? or partitioning is not neccesary? thnks.. not into gaming,,if that matters 🙂 using winxp athlon xp1800
 
Hi alfietooch, welcome to Anandtech.

Patitioning is one of the most widely argued about...er...debated and discussed things around here. It is not necessary in the least. You can have one 40GB partition, or 40 1GB partitions, it's entirely up to you.

I have found that if you only have one HD, it's best to not partition it at all. Use folders to keep organized. The only downside to this is BACKUP. Some folks will split a HD down the middle, and save backup copies of stuff to the "other" partition.

If you burn CDs and keep your important stuff on there, than paritioning isn't necessary. It's entirely up to you.
 
As Michael stated, partitioning is something that no one can seem to agree on. Personally, I choose to partition my drive for two reasons:

1.) I only have about 4 or 5 GB of programs including the OS and over 30GB of storage stuff (music, video, schoolwork, etc.). With only one partition, if I did a clean install, all of my storage stuff would be wiped from the hard drive. While I do backup all of my stuff regularly to CD-Rs, it's still a pain in the butt to have to re-copy all 30+GB of stuff back to my hard drive. With multiple partitions, I can completely kill the OS/programs partition, clean install if I need to, and still have all my storage stuff on the drive.

2.) I use Norton Ghost since it allows me to do a clean install in minutes. If I only had one partition, the ghost image of nearly 40GB of data would be huge and not very practical. Once again, with multiple partitions, I can create a small ghost image of just the OS/programs partition, which of course makes ghosting a lot easier and more practical.

It's really up to you. Weigh, the pros and cons of each and decide if you really want to partition. If you want some good info on this subject look here
 
One of the best reasons for partitioning is so that you can keep data and backups on D:, and not lose them if your OS gets messed up to the point where you need to re-format C:. Especially if you are formatting C: as NTFS instead of FAT32, since then you can't get at files with a DOS boot diskette.

Having D: is also very useful for writing images of the OS partition using Ghost or Drive Image.

[ Edit: d'oh! Shooters beat me to it 🙂 ]
 
FWIW,

I partition my desktop drive into at least 3 pieces:

1. OS (usually about 5GB, that way it's quicker to defragment and easy to reinstall)
2. Applications (Keeps the C:\ drive a little less fragmented from constant installs/uninstalls
3. Whatever else I want

Actually, now that I think of it, before I had a separate server to store data on, I had 2 drives in my system, the second one was just for data (for safe keeping). Now I store everything on the server. If you have only 1 drive, you could keep your data on the 3rd partition.

Have I been sufficiently vague?
 
well actually im quite lazy to burn my mp3 collection .. i have another 20 gig 5400 rpm drive full of mp3s.. im just planning to use that as my slavedrive so i'll have the otherdrive free for the os and other video files.. do i still partition or not since i'll be using two separate drives already.. thnks
 
whoa back it up. how do you mean "you don't have to partition"?

when i put a hard drive in the computer (WinXP Home, Win95 and Win98SE) Windows tell me it could not mount that partition so it does not let me put any data on it. how can i put data on it without partitions? if there is data but no partition, can both Linux and Windows access that data?
 
Originally posted by: ShawnDarichuk
whoa back it up. how do you mean "you don't have to partition"?

when i put a hard drive in the computer (WinXP Home, Win95 and Win98SE) Windows tell me it could not mount that partition so it does not let me put any data on it. how can i put data on it without partitions? if there is data but no partition, can both Linux and Windows access that data?
Click to expand...
You missed the point. Yes you have to partition, no you don't have to do more than one. That is entirely personal preference based on how you want to organize your stuph, back it up, etc.



 
>Patitioning is one of the most widely argued about...er...debated and discussed things around here.
> It is not necessary in the least. You can have one 40GB partition, or 40 1GB partitions, it's entirely up to you.

Has anybody tried 40 partitions? What happens? I'd try it, but if some one already has, that would be easier.

 
Originally posted by: alfietooch
40 gig 7200 baracuda... for basic ms office use , surfing, a little video editing and cd playing.. how should i partition this??? or partitioning is not neccesary? thnks.. not into gaming,,if that matters 🙂 using winxp athlon xp1800
Click to expand...

It's not really a question - it's a choice. I happen to not like my swap file/page file in the same logical partition as my OS - therefore, I keep it isolated so it doesn't constantly fragment my system files. Fixing the size helps also - and there are other files that get changed a lot, so keeping them separate also reduces fragging in the OS drive.

I have used 40 GB with a big C and a little D.
 
FIRST OF ALL, I have to give corky-g some serious acknowledgement for that signature. I think I may have a permanent smile on my face for that one ... 🙂

SECONDLY, a few of you may know that I enjoy partitioning as much as I do a good laugh. I think I'm up to 15 or so partitions on my 120GB monster. However, most of my partitioning can be attributed to multi-booting, as I am continually not satisfied with the FIVE OSes I've already got running on this thing. However, fo a single OS arrangement, I would only partition for some of the reasons already mentioned. In order to protect and preserve YOUR documents, MP3s, and such, you might as well move this information to its own partition. In the unpleasant event of a reformat, your data remains intact. Isolating swap space/page file to its own partition can prevent some serious fragmentation, yet can really impede performance.

-SUO
 
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