Does partitioning a hdd reduce the performance? I have a 120gig WD SE hdd and I partitioned it to approx 20/100 and I didn't really notice a difference in performance over my 2mb cache 7200 hdd's i had before.
partitioning hdd reduce performance?
- Thread starter lazybum550
- Start date
i have always partioned hard drives and have never heard that it may reduce performance. When you go to defrag a partition that will be faster than defraging the whole hard drive and you don't need to do all your partitions all at once either.
Whether you'd notice a performance difference between the two drives would depend on exactly what you were doing with them. If the caches aren't being put to much use, then a larger cache isn't going to make much difference.
Having multiple partitions doesn't reduce performance in general ("partitioning" is done even if you only have one partition). The OS doesn't get slow or anything when reading more than one partition. However it can result in particular things ending up located at a slower part of the drive. If you have a 120GB drive, and one partition, then installing things will generally result in them being installed from the outer edge of the drive inward. If you partition it into two drives, one being 20GB and one being 100GB, then install a game or something to the D drive, then it will result in those files being at least 20GB in toward the center of the disk. I don't know the exact ratios to determine where on the disk that would be, but probably something like 8 to 10 percent inward for the 16% amount of the 20GB (more data on the outer tracks). That's not a whole lot slower, but it is slower. If you only have 3GB of data on the C drive, then you'd end up wasting the performance of the intervening 17GB of space. If you had a smaller drive with the same number of platters (lower density) and still wanted a decent size partition (like two 20GB), then the performance loss would be greater, since you'd be up around 35 to 40% of the distance toward the center.
There's an AT FAQ regarding reasons for and against partitioning. It was definitely written with a bias toward the opinion that it's not of any value though. I personally use it to simply provide an easy location for my own data files, so I have less to do if I reinstall an OS, but there's really no point using partitions to separate apps and the OS anymore.
Having multiple partitions doesn't reduce performance in general ("partitioning" is done even if you only have one partition). The OS doesn't get slow or anything when reading more than one partition. However it can result in particular things ending up located at a slower part of the drive. If you have a 120GB drive, and one partition, then installing things will generally result in them being installed from the outer edge of the drive inward. If you partition it into two drives, one being 20GB and one being 100GB, then install a game or something to the D drive, then it will result in those files being at least 20GB in toward the center of the disk. I don't know the exact ratios to determine where on the disk that would be, but probably something like 8 to 10 percent inward for the 16% amount of the 20GB (more data on the outer tracks). That's not a whole lot slower, but it is slower. If you only have 3GB of data on the C drive, then you'd end up wasting the performance of the intervening 17GB of space. If you had a smaller drive with the same number of platters (lower density) and still wanted a decent size partition (like two 20GB), then the performance loss would be greater, since you'd be up around 35 to 40% of the distance toward the center.
There's an AT FAQ regarding reasons for and against partitioning. It was definitely written with a bias toward the opinion that it's not of any value though. I personally use it to simply provide an easy location for my own data files, so I have less to do if I reinstall an OS, but there's really no point using partitions to separate apps and the OS anymore.
this makes sense, but this would only allow for a single platter. If you have muliple platters say 4 x 20Gb platters for an 80Gb hard drive, partitioning it in lots of 20Gb should negate the slowness correct? Or have i miss understood what you have meant? thanks
very simple if you plan on partitioning your drive make sure if you work with bigger files like DVD movies ISO's etc... you put them on the right partition to begin with because it is a horror to move them. I was always a big fan of partitions but I now see no reason for it unless you are dual booting or are lazy with backing up. DUAL drives are the best way to go this way when you are transforming one file into another you are not bottolnecked by your drive reading and writing to is self.
Drives with multiple platters don't fill a single platter then move to the next one. The "cylinder" spec of a drive refers to each track of every platter. Say you have two platters, with 100 circular tracks, with 20GB on each platter's side (making an 80GB drive using heads on both sides of the platters). Cylinder 0 refers to track 0 on both sides of the first platter, as well as both sides of the second platter. The hard drive's controller fills all of track 0 on all 4 platter sides before moving to cylinder 1 (I'm ignoring anything like a partition table, boot record, file table, et cetera for simplicity). There are a couple of different patterns for how the drive actually writes the data to the platters, such as whether 4 bits gets written to all 4 heads at once, or whether they get all written to just the first head then it moves to the second head, but I believe all drives use the same pattern now.
So, if track 0's density gives it 1GB, that means 4GB is available on cylinder 0. Track 1 will have a slightly smaller data size because its circumference is smaller, so say maybe 3.999GB is available there. Then 3.998 on cylinder 3, and 3.997 on cylinder 4, and 3.996 on cylinder 5. In total, that's 19.99GB, composed of the first 5 cylinders of the drive, so even though there are multiple platters, the first partition still takes up the fastest parts of each platter (which is why people suggest putting your swap file on the first partition of an empty drive).
This is why partitions are never exactly the size you specify during partitioning -- the drive can only be partitioned along the specific boundaries of a cylinder, so the partition utility has to round up or down to match it. You try to make a 20GB partition, the result ends up being 19.99GB because it can't take the extra 0.01GB from the next cylinder. That's also why creating a "20GB" partition on one drive isn't the exact same size as on another type of drive; different densities, track layouts, and error correcting result in different cylinder boundaries.
So, if track 0's density gives it 1GB, that means 4GB is available on cylinder 0. Track 1 will have a slightly smaller data size because its circumference is smaller, so say maybe 3.999GB is available there. Then 3.998 on cylinder 3, and 3.997 on cylinder 4, and 3.996 on cylinder 5. In total, that's 19.99GB, composed of the first 5 cylinders of the drive, so even though there are multiple platters, the first partition still takes up the fastest parts of each platter (which is why people suggest putting your swap file on the first partition of an empty drive).
This is why partitions are never exactly the size you specify during partitioning -- the drive can only be partitioned along the specific boundaries of a cylinder, so the partition utility has to round up or down to match it. You try to make a 20GB partition, the result ends up being 19.99GB because it can't take the extra 0.01GB from the next cylinder. That's also why creating a "20GB" partition on one drive isn't the exact same size as on another type of drive; different densities, track layouts, and error correcting result in different cylinder boundaries.
Incidentally, http://www.storagereview.com/guide/guide_index.html is a good explanation of hard drives, as always. It doesn't mention the way the data is written to a particular cylinder though. The only place I ever found that was on Quantum's site, and it's gone now.
ahhh ok. I didn't know this.
And yes i always have trouble making a partition a certain exact size, it usually come out a bit smaller. thanks for the explaination
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