Partitions?

[Sbud]

An office mate has a dell computer. He thinks he only has one hard drive but it shows that he has both a C and D drive. Has this been partitioned? Also, what is the advantage of using partitions?

 

[Jex]

Not much. Some will argue that many smaller partitions are better because the block sizes are smaller and the drive is used more efficiently. Truth is you don't loose that much with big blocks. Besides, if you have a 60 GB drive, who cares if you loose even a GB?

That said, I recommend at least 2 partitions, but you can set up as many as works for you. Don't partition based on space usage, but what you want. I set up 2 partitions myself. 1 relatively small one (6 GB or so) for windows and all that stuff, and 1 with the remainder (in my case 54GB) for game installs, mp3, videos, file store, etc.

 

[Sbud]

Still not sure why one would use partitions. Does it help to avoid "screwing up" the more functional items (windows, applications, drivers, etc) with the funner things (mp3s, games, etc)? Also, should one decide to use partitions, what would be a good program, partition magic?

 

[ledzepp98]

from what i have heard partition magic is a good partitioning program (you only need it if windows is installed, if you do a clean install you can just use fdisk). in my opinion, the only good reason to partition is if you have only one big drive and you have a lot of bulk data (mp3's, divx, install files, etc...) and you want to separate windows from the data. personally, i would go with a rather large windows partition (in comparison to what others recommend) and the rest data. if you have a 30gig drive for example (which windows would see as 37.2gigs) i would go with about 7-10 gigs for windows, programs, games, basically anything that gets "installed" into windows. then leave the other 27-30 gigs for data. the idea is that if windows gets screwy, which it is known to do, you can just wipe that partition without losing your data on the other partition

 

[SUOrangeman]

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