What's the best way to partition a new hard drive?

[imported_TylerD]

I am about to set up a new hard drive in a PC I'm building. It's a 250 GB Maxtor drive. Should I block out like 2-5 gigs for Windows XP and leave the rest for my stuff? Not partition it at all? Also, I plan on doing a good share of video editing, so should I partition like 100 GB for putting raw video? I guess that's probably not a big deal. Also, I think I might want to dual-boot Linux. Should I give Linux it's own partition or can I possibly do that later if I decide to?

 

[8ballcoupe]

Probably every person you ask will have a different suggestion. This mostly depends upon your personal preferences. I tend to have one partition per hard drive if it's a Windows only machine. You're going to get a lot of pet theories here. I'll spare you mine, but I will make two solid (I think.) observations.

1. Two to five gigs allowed for this operating system is a ridiculously low limit (especially on a hard drive this of this size). The OS needs elbow room, especially if you'll be installing much software. Give it some room. Otherwise, you'll be reinstalling or using third party software to readjust your partition sizes later.

2. For big time video editing you're better off with the OS and video editing software on one physical drive and the video files on a different physical drive (as master on a different IDE controller) rather than separating into separate partitions on the same physical hard drive. In extreme cases I would have separate source and target drives for video conversions.

Ernie

 

[leosalchemist]

Originally posted by: 8ballcoupe

2. For big time video editing you're better off with the OS and video editing software on one physical drive and the video files on a different physical drive (as master on a different IDE controller) rather than separating into separate partitions on the same physical hard drive. In extreme cases I would have separate source and target drives for video conversions.

Ernie

Please explain the rationale behind this. Thanks.

 

[BDawg]

Originally posted by: leosalchemist

Originally posted by: 8ballcoupe

2. For big time video editing you're better off with the OS and video editing software on one physical drive and the video files on a different physical drive (as master on a different IDE controller) rather than separating into separate partitions on the same physical hard drive. In extreme cases I would have separate source and target drives for video conversions.

Ernie

Please explain the rationale behind this. Thanks.

Traditional IDE can't send operations to two devices on the same channel at once (it's parallel). Therefore, it'll be faster if you have one drive on each channel than two on one channel.

 

[CU]

I have a 5gig XP partition on a 200gig drive. The rest is one big partition for games and other programs. I would make the XP partition 7-10gig if I did it over. I don't install anything on C: and it works on 5gig but there is not much room left. Just don't download any large files to your desktop.