Partition size for VISTA ?

[Paradox999]

What would be the ideal partition size for an install of VISTA Ultimate?

My XP Pro partition is 16Gb and I have 7.5GB free.
I usually install major programs (Office, Photoshop etc etc) on a secondary partition.
C:\ usually only has the OS and all drivers and utilities.

How much space does VISTA eat up?

 

[postmortemIA]

first, your approach of separating OS and applications isn't smart one: you increase drive wear and decrease performance. That should answer your question.

 

[Paradox999]

 

[SimMike2]

I think Vista doesn't even like to install on less that 15GB. So you are right up against the wall. The fact you have an OS partition that small leads me to believe that maybe the rest of your system isn't up to Vista standards. If your computer is good enough, backup everything and make your primary partition bigger.

 

[Paradox999]

postmortemIA ,

I've never heard that one before....
By your logic, partitions themselves make no sense with perhaps the exception of hosting alternate OS's.

The c drive in my case is a small partition of a large hard drive. The main aps on E, the very next partition are in reality on exactly the same physical place on the drive as if there was no partition at all. In other words, why should my drive wear any faster getting to Photoshop on physical space x regardless of it being on C:\ or E:\ ?

Can you explain me that?

 

[Paradox999]

SimMike2,

My main drive is 320GB, and I'm running an E6400 @3.2 / 2gb ram, x1900xtx etc etc etc on an ASUS p5b dlx wi-fi.
That plenty fast.

I am trying to determine what size of primary partition, my C drive, would be best to host Vista, while keeping in mind that I want to limit that partition to Vista itself, drivers and small aps and utilities.

 

[Nothinman]

By your logic, partitions themselves make no sense with perhaps the exception of hosting alternate OS's.

That's pretty much correct. And unless you need physical hardware access in each OS using something like VMWare makes more sense than dualbooting so that's even less of a reason than it used to be.

The c drive in my case is a small partition of a large hard drive. The main aps on E, the very next partition are in reality on exactly the same physical place on the drive as if there was no partition at all. In other words, why should my drive wear any faster getting to Photoshop on physical space x regardless of it being on C:\ or E:\ ?

Well at least partly because you now have two MFTs so that's potentially twice as much seeking for file lookups and it's not so much an issue of wear, although that's a valid concern since moving parts in drives do die eventually, but seek time and latency. The lower you can keep your seek times the better and usually more partitions means more full seeks.

And if you are correct in that the physical location is the same (and it likely won't be because of the MFT issue) what benefits are you gaining by seperating them that you don't get with regular directories?

I am trying to determine what size of primary partition, my C drive, would be best to host Vista, while keeping in mind that I want to limit that partition to Vista itself, drivers and small aps and utilities.

Which is something you wouldn't have to worry about if you would just create one large partition. Also a few months from now when you realize that one of your partitions is too small you'll have to jump through some hoops to resize them to accomodate some new program, service pack, etc or start putting stuff on the "wrong" partition and there goes your organizational reasons for using partitions.

 

[Madwand1]

If you're partitioning, I'd suggest around 30 GB (~ 20 GB minimum), while still avoiding installing anything besides drivers and such on it.

I personally like keeping the OS, and its stuff separate from the programs and data just for organization, backups, etc., but I also wonder if it's worth giving up so much of the fastest part of the HD to just the OS, esp. in view of Vista's auto-defrag.

I'm running an RC at present in a 15 GB partition, and it's got around 2 GB free. It's bloatware.

 

[Arkaign]

Vista deserves 0mb of your space

 

[tickyour]

For Vista, I was generous: 50gb.

 

[Nothinman]

I personally like keeping the OS, and its stuff separate from the programs and data just for organization, backups, etc.,

That's what directories are for.

but I also wonder if it's worth giving up so much of the fastest part of the HD to just the OS

It's only the fast throughput-wise and for pretty much all use cases that's irrelevant, seek times and latency are what kill performance. Throughput only really matters when you're doing things that do large sequential reads like A/V editing.

 

[adairusmc]

Originally posted by: Arkaign
Vista deserves 0mb of your space

:roll:

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
That's what directories are for.

I prefer a small OS partition, so that I can manage it separately, back it up, fragment it, ignore it, etc.. Partitioning is an available tool for these things. I didn't read anything in the fine print about having to use directories, and I ain't going to sign either.

It's only the fast throughput-wise and for pretty much all use cases that's irrelevant, seek times and latency are what kill performance. Throughput only really matters when you're doing things that do large sequential reads like A/V editing.

The size of the OS partition matters for the seek distance to what's not on that partition. Which is among the primary reasons for not using separate partitions... Keep that smaller however, and the reason is reduced. I like and use high STR too; not so much on the OS though. So I generally prefer to go to a separate drive or array, and sometimes use the rest of the "OS" drive for stuff that's rarely accessed.

 

[Nothinman]

I prefer a small OS partition, so that I can manage it separately, back it up, fragment it, ignore it, etc.. Partitioning is an available tool for these things. I didn't read anything in the fine print about having to use directories, and I ain't going to sign either.

Unless you found some way to force Windows to install all of it's files into the root of that partition then you're already using directories for organization whether you like it or not. And a 2x4 is also an available tool for pounding in nails but that doesn't mean it's a good idea.

So I generally prefer to go to a separate drive or array, and sometimes use the rest of the "OS" drive for stuff that's rarely accessed.

Seperate physical drives can make sense but 9/10 times partitions don't and end up being more trouble than they're worth.

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Unless you found some way to force Windows to install all of it's files into the root of that partition then you're already using directories for organization whether you like it or not. And a 2x4 is also an available tool for pounding in nails but that doesn't mean it's a good idea.

D'oh! I think the reverse argument is more appropriate -- using directories to do all organization while partitions may be helpful in some cases is more akin to using one tool to solve all problems.

I'm done here.

 

[Nothinman]

D'oh! I think the reverse argument is more appropriate -- using directories to do all organization while partitions may be helpful in some cases is more akin to using one tool to solve all problems.

The problem is that when, not if, you run out of space on one of those partitions it's a lot more work to resize it and if you opt not to resize it then you end up putting stuff on the "wrong" partition and losing your organization.

 

[13Gigatons]

Since your installing your apps on another partition I would say 20 gigs should be sufficient. Vista on install takes 7-8 gigs by itself but it tends to grow overtime.

 

[Jeff7181]

I have a 36 GB Raptor with Windows and most of my applications on it. Games and data are stored on a second drive with two partitions. In retrospect, I wish I had left it as one parition. I've seen no benefit to having two partitions, and I've already filled my "game partition" with 100 GB worth of games and had to start putting them on my "data partition." A reason people have used in the past to partition was that fragmentation was a problem for FAT32. Doesn't seem to be a big deal with NTFS. When I got that second hard drive and installed all my games on it and udpated them, it was about 40% fragmented... after defragmenting there wasn't a noticeable difference in performance, load times or otherwise.

 

[13Gigatons]

Originally posted by: Jeff7181
I have a 36 GB Raptor with Windows and most of my applications on it. Games and data are stored on a second drive with two partitions. In retrospect, I wish I had left it as one parition. I've seen no benefit to having two partitions, and I've already filled my "game partition" with 100 GB worth of games and had to start putting them on my "data partition." A reason people have used in the past to partition was that fragmentation was a problem for FAT32. Doesn't seem to be a big deal with NTFS. When I got that second hard drive and installed all my games on it and udpated them, it was about 40% fragmented... after defragmenting there wasn't a noticeable difference in performance, load times or otherwise.

You could increase the size of your game partition with the right partitioning tool like Partition Commander by Vcom.

 

[Netopia]

I make a largish C: drive normally of about 32-50GB on which I install the OS and all my apps. I keep data (like photos and stuff) on a separate partition. The reason I do this is that normally the second partition on the drive is a 32GB Fat32 partition that I use to make Ghost images of the C: drive. After rebooting, I copy the images over to a storage server, but leave them on the drive... that way, if the OS gets screwed up, but the drive is ok, I can just boot from a DOS/Ghost disk and restore just the OS partition.

I keep my data on another partition so that I'm not Ghosting all of that (I back that stuff up separately), but I don't even understand the philosophy of keeping OS and programs on different partitions since, if either partition were to get hosed, you end up having to reinstall all the programs anyway... to me, it's sort of like striping, where you've got two points of failure that can screw things up.

Joe

 

[Nothinman]

You could increase the size of your game partition with the right partitioning tool like Partition Commander by Vcom.

If you're willing to risk the data on those filesystems because that's always an iffy operation. Creating a new directory on one large filesystem will always succeed except in the most extreme circumstances while resizing filesystems has as a failure rate of at least a thousand times more.

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: 13Gigatons

Originally posted by: Jeff7181
I have a 36 GB Raptor with Windows and most of my applications on it. Games and data are stored on a second drive with two partitions. In retrospect, I wish I had left it as one parition. I've seen no benefit to having two partitions, and I've already filled my "game partition" with 100 GB worth of games and had to start putting them on my "data partition." A reason people have used in the past to partition was that fragmentation was a problem for FAT32. Doesn't seem to be a big deal with NTFS. When I got that second hard drive and installed all my games on it and udpated them, it was about 40% fragmented... after defragmenting there wasn't a noticeable difference in performance, load times or otherwise.

You could increase the size of your game partition with the right partitioning tool like Partition Commander by Vcom.

I could, but it's not worth it. I just won't make that mistake again.

 

[StopSign]

I have a 160 GB drive that I use for only OS and programs. My XP partition is 50 GB and is currently the only partition on the drive.

 

[13Gigatons]

Originally posted by: Jeff7181

Originally posted by: 13Gigatons

Originally posted by: Jeff7181
I have a 36 GB Raptor with Windows and most of my applications on it. Games and data are stored on a second drive with two partitions. In retrospect, I wish I had left it as one parition. I've seen no benefit to having two partitions, and I've already filled my "game partition" with 100 GB worth of games and had to start putting them on my "data partition." A reason people have used in the past to partition was that fragmentation was a problem for FAT32. Doesn't seem to be a big deal with NTFS. When I got that second hard drive and installed all my games on it and udpated them, it was about 40% fragmented... after defragmenting there wasn't a noticeable difference in performance, load times or otherwise.

You could increase the size of your game partition with the right partitioning tool like Partition Commander by Vcom.

I could, but it's not worth it. I just won't make that mistake again.

Wimp.....I just resize some partition using the commander and it went well. I of course have all my data backed up so I had no fear.

Partition Magic on the other hand is a terribly buggy product.

 

[Jeff7181]

Wimp? Lol... you're ridiculous.