hard drive partitioning ..

R

racerjosh

New member
ive been reading about partitioning the hard drive lately and im just curious does partitioning the hard drive live up to the 'better performance' its said to have or is it not a really noticable increase ?

on my new rig i will have a 160GB SATA2 hard drive and was thinking of having it partitioned into 3 parts

>gaming (holding all my games)

>software (anything i download after a fresh install of xp)

>windows (anything that is on the computer after a fresh install of xp (after i have deleted the little bits i dont need)

or should i just leave it as it is and just organise the drive like i have with my current PC and just do disk cleanups and disk defragments ?
 
Might be wrong, but I dont see any reason why performance would be increased? As far as the hard drive is concerned, it doesnt matter where it is reading data from with regards to how fast it can do it.
 
I find it is best to have a partition for Windows and then one for games.. and one for storage.

Basically what you have said.

At the moment I have a "System" partition and the "games" partition.

Best performance that way.. you can keep the agmes drive defragged.. and they are easy to find to.
 
name='SBB' said:
Might be wrong, but I dont see any reason why performance would be increased? As far as the hard drive is concerned, it doesnt matter where it is reading data from with regards to how fast it can do it.
Click to expand...

from what ive read it makes sence that it should increase performance.. e.g.

if you have 160 items and you have 2 rooms in your house. you need to find item 69 and you no that item 69 is in room 2 so you only have to search through a max of 80 files to find file 69 ... if you only have one room you would have to search through a max of 160 files to find file 69. so partitioning from what i understand is just helping the computer find the files it needs quicker, therefore more peformance. a straight route is always quicker than taking multipule turns :)

as for patitioning all the windows stuff; is it easy to do ? and what software is best recommened to use?
 
i would say the opposite, if your using 2 partitions surely it would be slower?

windows running off one, data coming off another means the heads will have to move twice as much? surely getting other drives is faster?
 
name='SuB' said:
i would say the opposite, if your using 2 partitions surely it would be slower?

windows running off one, data coming off another means the heads will have to move twice as much? surely getting other drives is faster?
Click to expand...

Getting another drive would be faster true.. but I believe we are looking for the cheap way to performance. ;)

Windows usually runs from RAM.. so it will only load its components at boot..

The first partition would be rarely used other than page file, at least in my experiance.

I think when you parttion, the HDD allocates some of the heads to one partition and some to the other.

So hopefully not too much moving about. ;)
 
one good thing about partioning is that if your os goes haywire when you reformat,you dont lose anything else thats stored on the other partions

Also if you play games that use Punkbuster then it will make a difference as it only scans the drive where the game files are
 
name='racerjosh' said:
if you have 160 items and you have 2 rooms in your house. you need to find item 69 and you no that item 69 is in room 2 so you only have to search through a max of 80 files to find file 69 ... if you only have one room you would have to search through a max of 160 files to find file 69. so partitioning from what i understand is just helping the computer find the files it needs quicker
Click to expand...

Your logic isn't flawed although this isn't what would actually happen. Due to the use of a File Allocation Table, a single read operation returns the physical location on disk of the requested data. So in fact the number of partitions is irrelevant to the seek time of any particular request. As SuB has mentioned, the real world performance is decreased due to the fact that data requested simultaneously from the seperate partitions will infact half in read time due to the HD head needing to perform twice the amount of operations.
 
name='nepas' said:
one good thing about partioning is that if your os goes haywire when you reformat,you dont lose anything else thats stored on the other partions

Also if you play games that use Punkbuster then it will make a difference as it only scans the drive where the game files are
Click to expand...

name='duke' said:
Your logic isn't flawed although this isn't what would actually happen. Due to the use of a File Allocation Table, a single read operation returns the physical location on disk of the requested data. So in fact the number of partitions is irrelevant to the seek time of any particular request. As SuB has mentioned, the real world performance is decreased due to the fact that data requested simultaneously from the seperate partitions will infact half in read time due to the HD head needing to perform twice the amount of operations.
Click to expand...

Indeed in both cases.

A small drive, around 80g, is a good size to put 2 partitions on. 60g for OS and u`r utils, and 20g for firstly a copy of ur 60g in the form of an image, and of course u all put u`r email folder (and arguably favorites, data shortcuts etc) outside the main OS install ;) the 20g partition can house that.

If the sheet hits the fan, u re-image the 60g and u get ur emails (favorites, data) back automagically :)

Seperate drive for ur games cos ur OS fingers it`s drive so many times whilst u play ur games it`s silly. Whether it`s checking schedules or merely accessing the swap. This accessing can hamper ur game loading alot.
 
name='duke' said:
data requested simultaneously from the seperate partitions will infact half in read time due to the HD head needing to perform twice the amount of operations.
Click to expand...

i assume u meant doubled there not halved:P
 
just to make things simple :) il just patition the hard drive into 2 .. one for games and the other for anything else (windows; software; etc)

how much out of the 160GB should i have seperate for gaming ? 50GB ?

best programm to do it with ?
 
Maxtor MaxBlast is an excellent piece of free software for doing stuff like that. It's just a free, slimmed down version of Acronis TrueImage. As far as I know you dont actually NEED a maxtor drive to run it either.

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...toid=7add8b9c4a8ff010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD

Edit: Ignore, it cant manage partitions... thought it could...

TBH you could just bypass software altogether and partition it using the windows installer when you put windows on the drive!
 
I would say 50gb is a little low for games. Programs like steam can use over 20gb when full loaded.
 
id swap that so windows is the smaller and games is the biggest section i need to clone my 200 gb drive onto my 500gb drive becuase the games are taking up so much damn space.. lol

what software does that btw?
 
name='SuB' said:
id swap that so windows is the smaller and games is the biggest section i need to clone my 200 gb drive onto my 500gb drive becuase the games are taking up so much damn space.. lol

what software does that btw?
Click to expand...

the programm im going to use can either copy or merge two hard drives together i think which may be able to help you there :)

how much do you think windows and other applications will need out of 160GB then ?
 
name='SuB' said:
id swap that so windows is the smaller and games is the biggest section i need to clone my 200 gb drive onto my 500gb drive becuase the games are taking up so much damn space.. lol

what software does that btw?
Click to expand...

acronis true image does it as well
 
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