Partitioning a large HDD - long-term wear and tear issues?

[orangepancake]

Hi - For a media/storage drive, I'm thinking about breaking a new, big one into small partitions so I can use Snapraid (for the purpose of parity/bitrot prevention, not the RAID part) since small drives are cheaper. Do 2-3 partitions on a large drive cause any issues? I'm concerned with having a file on partition 1, a file on partition 2, and trying to read both at the same time - more head movement or something related that would shorten the life of the drive.

 

[IntelUser2000]

Doesn't sound like a good idea. Increased head movement will not help with possible mechanical failures.

I think you should get a second drive even for parity/bitrot prevention purposes. You might get protection from bitrot, but really you are sacrificing in one area to get it better in another.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

It'll kill performance too. The last thing you want with an HDD is head movement in any shape or form. R/W speeds drop from 100-150MB/s+ to 1-1.5MB/s very, very quickly if the disk has to move the R/W heads. Filling f.x. a 4TB drive at 1MB/s is not going to be fun.

If you're serious about bitrot protection, you should be looking at a multi disk RAID setup (for home usage RAID1 is fine) formatted with ZFS. Storage Spaces with ReFS might be an option for Windows, but I'm not well versed in that.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Get a NAS!

 

[dave_the_nerd]

You can short-stroke a hard drive for better performance - that used to be a thing people did. But it's irrelevant now.

It really won't make a difference for reliability or longevity. Whether you've got multiple partitions or not doesn't matter - if your drive needs to read data in two different parts of the drive, it's going to have to move that head around. Having parity information in a second partition is actually terrible, since you will have to constantly rewrite that parity data. (Bouncing between the different partitions and causing exactly the sort of thrashing you're trying to avoid.)

When hard drives fail, they fail - having parity information on one part of the drive is unlikely to help you, since the whole thing is going to have read/write issues.

If you want a big media drive, just get a drive, set it up with a single partition, and put your media on it. Then make sure that data is backed up elsewhere.