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Partitioned harddrive....Decreased performance?

I think it might increase it because the file system would be alot simplier than using only one big partition.

That being said, I don't know ****** about it.
 
Subjective increase, from an individual viewpoint of data housekeeping. But there's a physical increase due to the FAT and how the heads need to read the drive.

I've been partitioning every drive I've owned since OSR2 released, it's always been the best option.
 
Transfer data from partition A to partition B would be slower than transfer of same data from HD A to HD B.
 
Originally posted by: greyeyezz
Doesn't spanning multiple partitions increase seek time?
Click to expand...
Not necessarily. Spanning may not be required.

A farmer can plow a ten acre field faster than a 20 acre field.

You can time defrag operations easily. Check out the difference between a 20 GB and a 80 GB partition.

You really can't make sensible rules one way or the other. It depends on how the partitions are used to a large degree.

 
A farmer can plow a ten acre field faster than a 20 acre field.
Click to expand...

If a ten acre field and a twenty acre field only have 5 acre of crops each he'll plow them in the same amount of time.

If a twenty acre field has 5 acre of crops that's contiguous, vs 5 acre split in three sections which would plow faster?

 
Well the answer to your question depends on what kind of performance you are talking about. In terms of copying files between the partitions, it would have massive decrease in performance but in terms of loading games etc, it shouldn't. As long as you are not using 2 partitions at once, there shouldn't be a decrease in performance.
 
Originally posted by: greyeyezz
If a ten acre field and a twenty acre field only have 5 acre of crops each he'll plow them in the same amount of time.
Click to expand...

Not at all. The entire 20 acres and 5 acres must be navigated by the tractor, and the speed is constant. Put it this way - if you drive at the speed limit, which has the shorter time result? Driving 20 miles or 5 miles? Farmers don't plow crops unless they do so to destroy them and get a government subsidy. 🙂 Fields are plowed prior to cultivating and planting. You must be a city dude. 🙂



 
YEEEEHAAAAAAAW.

it totally depends on how you're going to use your drive, i recommend not plowing fields with it.
 
Originally posted by: killersoundz
Does having a partitioned hard drive decrease it's performance in anyway?
Click to expand...

It depends, if it's anything smaller than 80 GB just keep it as one partition

but if the HDD is larger than 120 or 160GB then having 2 partion will actually increase performance

once i tried to leave a 160 GB and 320 GB as 1 big huge partition and performance was horrible

once i chunked it down into 2 and 4 respectively then they worked really fast.
 
Originally posted by: stevolution
Well the answer to your question depends on what kind of performance you are talking about. In terms of copying files between the partitions, it would have massive decrease in performance but in terms of loading games etc, it shouldn't. As long as you are not using 2 partitions at once, there shouldn't be a decrease in performance.
Click to expand...
Do you really believe that copying files from one partition to another suffers a "massive" decrease in performance vs. copying files onto the same partition?
 
The question of seek time depends on usage patterns. Longer seeks take more time. You don't want your drive head to be seeking back and forth over the whole disk, so if you can keep the head movement in a smaller range by making a smaller system partition, that helps.

There's also transfer rate. The outer tracks of a disk drive have the fastest transfer rate because they have the fastest linear velocity under the heads. The cylinder numbers start on the outside, so the first partition on the disk will be the fastest.

Now whether this all makes enough difference for you to notice without a stopwatch? I don't know. YMMV
 
Originally posted by: AllGamer
Originally posted by: killersoundz
Does having a partitioned hard drive decrease it's performance in anyway?
Click to expand...

It depends, if it's anything smaller than 80 GB just keep it as one partition

but if the HDD is larger than 120 or 160GB then having 2 partion will actually increase performance

once i tried to leave a 160 GB and 320 GB as 1 big huge partition and performance was horrible

once i chunked it down into 2 and 4 respectively then they worked really fast.
Click to expand...


Has anyone done any studies and shown the results with benchmarks?

It's easy to subjectively say that one setup is faster than another by how it feels, but often there is a placebo effect.

(are you listening Anand?)
 
A 320GB drive has 2 platters, and 2 actuators. If you set them up into 2 partitions then they head movement is balanced and read/writes will not contend with each other

The outer edge of a platter is faster than the inner edge. An OS should always be put on the 1st partition of a physical drive to gain that extra rotational speed benefit.

 
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