oldfart,
<<Did you know that once you get to a 32 gig or larger drive you go to 32k clusters? That is like the old crappy fat 16 size. Would you recommend one large partition in this case?>>
Absolutely. You have to keep things in perspective. With a drive that size, are you going to be storing hundreds of thousands of tiny text files? Of course not. You'll be storing games with their cabinet data files, collections of MP3's, photo graphics, and digital video -- all relatively large files. In other words, people with large drives are storing relatively small numbers of relatively large files. This is the typical footprint on today's hard drives, and it makes cluster slack much less apparent, because remember, the larger the file, the less space it wastes. Cluster slack on a full hard drive simply does not approach the 30% figure that some saw in the days of small FAT16 volumes with large numbers of smaller files.
Don't believe me? Do a test, right now. Everyone open My Computer, open your C: drive, click Edit > Select All (click OK if prompted about hidden files), then click File > Properties. Next to Size, you will see three numbers, with the second number in brackets. Subtract the third number from the second number, and that is the exact amount of wasted space on the drive due to cluster slack.
Less than you thought? Yup. Of my roughly 6G of data with 8k clusters, I wasted a paltry 50M, less than 1%. Even with 32k clusters, I would only waste four times more, a still insignificant 200M. That's about 4%.
Bottom line: cluster slack is no longer an issue. It stopped being an issue when we adopted FAT32, and it's even less relevant in light of modern storage demands for relatively large files which waste very little space.
As for the StorageReview article, the following quotation nicely sums up the proper view of the matter:
"Tip: Do remember not to go overboard in your efforts to avoid slack. To keep it all in perspective, let's take the worst case above, where 354 MB of space is wasted. With the cost per megabyte of disk now below 10 cents, this means that the "cost" of this problem is well below $50. That doesn't mean that wasting hundreds of megabytes of storage is smart; obviously I don't think that or I wouldn't have written so much about slack and partitioning. :^) But on the other hand, spending 20 hours and $100 on utility software may not be too smart either. Moderation is often the key to using partitioning to reduce slack, so don't be taken in by some of the "partitioning fanatics" who seem to have lost sight of the fact that disk space is really very cheap today."
And remember, disk space is now much cheaper than when the author wrote those words.
<<Also I cant see why having Widows, swap, and program files optimized to use the fastest part of the drive can be a bad thing.>>
It's a bad thing because it needlessly complicates your drive management scheme while yielding no postitive benefit in real world performance.
<<I've said my piece on this. Its obviously a personal preference kinda thing.>>
The whole point of these kind of dicussions is to throw personal preference out the window and determine what solution meets your concrete needs. If all we cared about was personal preference, there'd be no point even talking to eachother. For that matter, Anand would be out of a job, because benchmarks would be meaningless. We'd just lay our hands on the hardware and wait for that warm fuzzy feeling. . . No thanks, let's keep personal preference out of computer hardware and stick to the hard facts.
Zorba,
I believe I should get every KB I paid for
Then you better RMA your hard drive pronto, cause according to your criteria, it's defective 😉
<<Modus, it is pointless to try to talk to you, because think that you are always right no matter what>>
Actually, that's true. I do always think I'm right. And if I'm not sure that I'm right, I say so. The reason I rub some people the wrong way is that I don't qualify my opinions with a timid "IMHO" or "my 2 cents". I just state the argument and quote the facts. It's the first thing you learn in high school English -- there's rarely a need to say "I think" or "in my opinion". Any intelligent reader will realize that your writing is, by definiton, your opinion, and treat it that way. It's the strength of your facts and arguments that convinces an intelligent reader.
<<I personally really like my drives partitioned. But I don't think you should have to partition you HDDs because you may not like it.>>
You're missing the point. This discussion is not about personal preference or the freedom to do what you want with your own property. Really, if it "floats your boat" then by all means, go ahead and chop up your drive into 24 partitions, C to Z. That doesn't mean what you're doing makes sense or improves your computing efficiency in any tangible way, it just means that you wanted to do it, so you did it. If, on the other hand, you actually want to try and find some valid reasons for partitoning -- which no one really has so far, other than the warm fuzzy feeling it gives them to say they're a REAL tech now, they PARTITIONED their hard drive -- then please do so and quit attacking me personally.
MDay,
<<partitioning is a way to save space through minimized clusters sizes>>
Nope. As we've seen, the space saved by partitioning a modern FAT32 drive containing contemporary data files is not significant.
<<and organization to have applications and data separate>>
Keeping data and programs on seperate drives accomplishes absolutely nothing, organization-wise, compared to keeping them in separate folders.
<<also, smaller partitions are more easily defragged =) which is my primary reason to partition>>
This is a common argument, but it too is wrong. Eventually, you will always want to defragment your entire drive. When you do, it takes just as much time to defragment three 10G partitions as it does to defragment one 30G partition. And even if you skip one of the partitions because the data stored there is static, the defragmentation program will in effect do the same thing when encoutering unfragmented data on a large volume. So in the long run, no time is saved at all.
<<but with the advent of video editting being possible with most systems today, it is better to have a HUGE partition ready>>
Definitely.
Modus
