Do you partition your Hard drive?

[ahtze]

If Yes why?

If no why?

I Do partition my hard drive into 2 partition, 1st for OS, 2nd for files.

Will that make my games stutter?

 

[babaghan]

I don't partition my drives, but then I'm fortunate to be able to have multiple drives for different tasks. I also disable indexing on my drives. Evidently, it slows down searching for files (if you're the type to be constantly looking for misplaced files), ergo the drives aren't accessed as much thus prolonging their life and reduce operational noise. As always, I defer to more experienced people than myself.

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[jaguarskx]

I have three drives, but only one, 80GB HDD, is partitioned. A 20GB partition for the OS and the remain 60GB is for general storage.

A 160GB HDD for games, music, and general storage.

A 320GB HDD for video and the Page File.

 

[Nick_C]

Even if only one HDD is fitted in the system, I would suggest OS, Swapfile & Data partitions are all created. OS: 16GB to 20GB, Primary Partition. Swapfile: first logical drive in Extended Partition, fixed size swapfile @ 4 x RAM size (I usually put my Temp / Temporary Internet Files directories on this drive). Data: remainder of Extended Partition as second logical drive.

If more than one, Swapfile as Primary partition on second HDD.

 

[jsc]

Computer #1 - 250 GB drive, 2 equal partitions - 1st part.: system & programs, 2nd part.: data and other stuff I do not use regularly.
500 GB drive: unpartitioned (took a looong time to format): image of boot partition and media storage.

Computer #2 - 120 GB drive, 2 equal partitions, removable 80 GB for image storage

Computer #3 - Same as #2

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[Stewartwi]

I have one 320 gig Seagate I keep everything on this one drive and one partition. Granted I don't anything I care about losing on just this drive. I mainly use online storage for pics and what not. Everything else important docs and what not are on a flash drive. I tend to reformat every 6 months just for the hell of it. But that's just me.

 

[hubbardt]

A raptor drive for my o/s (20Gb) and games (130Gb).
A 2TB NAS unit (RAID 5 to give 1.5TB storage) for my downloads

 

[runswindows95]

-HDD #1
60GB NTFS for XP Pro
59GB ext3 for Linux
256MB Swap for Linux

-HDD #2

140GB NTFS for mp3's
60GB NTFS for my stuff

 

[kitchenshark]

I don't partition my hard drives. It's a waste of time and effort.

EVERY partition I've had under ANY Windows platform has UTTERLY failed with massive data loss.

The most recent one under Windows XP about a year ago was the most spectacular. I had a 200Gb IDE drive setup as two ~100gb NTFS partitions and it worked fine for a month. One night I shut it off, turned it on next morning and one paritition was destroyed and the other could only be read as a FAT16 drive. And all I did was shut it down for the night. XD

Partitions are a BIG no go for me.

 

[widjerd]

i have 3 partitions,
58gb for vista
65gb for xp
25gb for intermediate storage

altho as i never use xp any more, ill prob cut the xp partition down to about 30GB and stick it in the intermediate storage

 

[ethel]

If Yes why?

If no why?

I Do partition my hard drive into 2 partition, 1st for OS, 2nd for files.

Will that make my games stutter?

I have 2 disks, so I don't need to have separate partitions. But if I had one disk, I would partition.

The advantage of having a separate OS partition is that it makes it easier to do a clean reinstall of the OS without affecting your data - just wipe your OS partition and start again.

The disadvantage is that you might waste space on either partition (ie you could fill up your data partition with oodles of space left on your OS partition) - but you can use partition resizing software to sort that out.

However, it will not affect the speed of Windows or games at all - you need separate physical disks for that.

 

[lesterf1020]

I have 4 main partitions.

1 partition for my OS (WindowsXP SP2)

1 partition for my data (I redirected the Mydocuments folder) and some small non essential utilities.

1 partition for downloaded drivers, updates and software installations so I don't have to go looking for CD's and DVD's all the time.

1 really large partition for Games, video, audio editing and large temp files.

I have a harddrive dedicated to partition backups with a seperate copy of WinXP.

I did this so that I can backup and restore the OS or even reinstall windows or another OS without having to worry about my data. I can also backup and restore data without having to worry about the OS. This allows me to backup the OS once a week and the data daily, which is efficient for me and allows me to experiment with few consequences. I can always reinstall my games and the driver stuff is on cd's and DVD's

 

[rodney_ws]

I don't partition my hard drives. It's a waste of time and effort.

EVERY partition I've had under ANY Windows platform has UTTERLY failed with massive data loss.

The most recent one under Windows XP about a year ago was the most spectacular. I had a 200Gb IDE drive setup as two ~100gb NTFS partitions and it worked fine for a month. One night I shut it off, turned it on next morning and one paritition was destroyed and the other could only be read as a FAT16 drive. And all I did was shut it down for the night. XD

Partitions are a BIG no go for me.

I think you're in the minority on this one. Maybe it's just you and not the computer/partitions?

 

[hubbardt]

I have to say that I have never had partitioning cause me problems. I've got machines nearly 10 years old that are still working perfectly fine ...

 

[olmecoid]

Yes I do
Why
a) If I have a severe OS problem I can reinstall it with out worryng about my data.
b) If I have a severe hardware problem, such as mobo failure, my data is safe

As you can see if you have only one hd and if you care about your data, is safer to have a partition eclusively for your data. As some one in the forum is also safer to have an hd for your data.

You may consider that some apps run smother in a different partition from the OS (Photoshop, for instance).

 

[kitchenshark]

I know I'm in the minority, I just wish I knew why. :/

Similar situations have happened on Win 95, 98, 98SE, 2000 and XP. With AMD K-2, AMD Thunderbird, AMD XP 1800+, AMD XP 2500+, A64 3200+. And all types of hard drives. All the times I remember the partitions usually fail while they're just running. I've been gaming during some of the failures, sometimes just overnight while they're running, or shut them down, start them up and they're gone, I did have one collapse during a game install too... ARGHHHH!!! It's frustrating!

In the end I've decided to just say screw it and will never use a partition again.

 

[ahtze]

Thanks for the input.

My Setup is always 20GB for XP and 25GB for Vista.

Programs on their own partition. The rest will be for my games and storage

 

[jay2tall]

Just out of good practice you should partition your drive into at least 2 if you do not have a seperate drive for data. I currently have my 250 into 3 slices. C = at 100 GB for my winxp OS and games and such. D = 20GB for my dual boot server 2003 std so i can monkey with while doing my MCSE books. And E: 130Gb for my data and junk. I also have a seperate 80GB that I used for junk and game images and other crap. I also have an eternal 250GB USB that I use as a backup device and run backup of my data.

Its just a good idea to keep your OS and apps seperate from data because if you ever have to reinstall from virus or corrupt files you just format that partion and reinstall. That way your data is safe on another partition. the only way you woudl loose your data is if your who drive craps out. But then again that is what backups are for.

 

[techgeek]

I partition. Usually my OS/data partition is the largest partition and a second partition for downloads. If I have to do a windows re-install, I copy over any data I want kept to the smaller partition and then re-format and re-install. Once done I move back the data from the second partition. It's nice to not have to download all apps that I have downloaded over the years. I've got a fast connection, but it's still a pain.

Someone mentioned that they put their swap file on a separate partition. Not a good choice it your system pages out often, causes a lot of head thrashing (read/write head forced to move large distances back and forth during paging). In the day of 2G+ of RAM it's not a big deal since very little paging occurs (unless you are doing lots of video or photo editing). If you really want to increase performance for paging, put your swap file on a separate drive (physical not logical). With Linux you have to have a swap partition, but it's still better if you can put your swap partition on a separate drive.

 

[ZOldDude]

I don't bother..."C" drive is a small 120-200GB drive and the other larger drives are storage.

I also have never had to reinstall an OS.
I use Spinrite 1-2 times a year to "refresh" the drives platters and then use a program to CLEAN/DEFRAGMENT the REGISTRY each month befor doing a normal HD defrag....just as fast as the day I installed the OS and on some drives that was the first day XP went onsale.

I had a power outage that did corrupt a drive and make it non-bootable...Spinrite got it up and running.
Another time I had a PSU die and corrupt a drive (befor I bought Spinrite) and all I did was a "repair install" of the OS and never lost my files.

 

[fredgiblet]

I have multiple drives and so I only partition when I'm doing multiple boots. IMO people who have a lot of partitions for organizational purposes actually make it harder to keep track of stuff, but that's just MO. I'd say minimum of 2 partitions, one for Windows, one for everything else unless you have seperate hard drives.

 

[fredgiblet]

I don't partition my hard drives. It's a waste of time and effort.

EVERY partition I've had under ANY Windows platform has UTTERLY failed with massive data loss.

The most recent one under Windows XP about a year ago was the most spectacular. I had a 200Gb IDE drive setup as two ~100gb NTFS partitions and it worked fine for a month. One night I shut it off, turned it on next morning and one paritition was destroyed and the other could only be read as a FAT16 drive. And all I did was shut it down for the night. XD

Partitions are a BIG no go for me.

What the hell do you do to your computer? In the 10 years I've been fiddling with my (and my families) computers I've only ever had 2 hard drives die and never had a partition go corrupt.

 

[Wylkell]

I don't partition my hard drives. It's a waste of time and effort.

Not to nit pick but you have to partition a harddrive to format it (and subsequently use it for data storage). All drives in windows have a partition (at least one).

With regards to having mulitple parititions, you'll get no performance difference between having one large partition for a disk or several smaller ones. The only performance difference you might see is if you have a normally very fragmented disk, then multiple partitions can help keep that to a minimum, and the non-fragmented partitions wont experiance the slow-downs of the more fragmented partitions. Sort of a segregation if you will, though for most people, you wont see any difference at all (or defrag your disk more often and you wont).

As for stability though, i guess multiple partitions could put you at more of a risk of having your partition tables go bad and loosing the data on that system (simply by virtue of having more then one partition table), but that should be pretty rare (rarer then the disk itself going bad, which multiple partitions wont fix).

Really, the only difference for most people between 1 or more partitions on a single disk comes down to organization issues and the idea of wanting to reload your OS easily (you dont have to reformat a drive to reload your OS, you just have to somehow wipe out all of the files that will conflict with the new OS like program files and the windows dir). So it still is very much a preference thing.

 

[Zayce]

My desktop has nothing special as far as partitioning goes. My laptop, however, is a quad-boot system since I need to be familiar with many operating systems.

The partition scheme is made of (using the ever-handy GParted utility) three primary partitions and one extended partition with three logical partitions within it.

Primary Partition #1: 15GB, NTFS, Windows XP
Primary Partition #2: 15GB, NTFS, Windows Vista
Primary Partition #3: 15GB, HFS+, Mac OS X (X86) 10.4.8*
Extended Partition
\_ Logical Partition #1: 15GB, ext3, Ubuntu 6.10
\_ Logical Partition #2: 256MB, Linux-swap
\_ Logical Partition #3: 33.2GB, FAT32, Used for inter-OS storage.

To manage the whole thing, I use the GRUB bootloader. I would have used VMware, but that's too easy.


*- Technically illegal. :?

 

[millebi]

I always partition my drive into at least 2 partitions. 1 for the Operating System, the other for Data. My main reasoning is that it's easier to make partition backup of the OS onto the data partition using things like Norton Ghost, DD, and their like.

I always attempt to keep the swap file/partition on a separate physical drive as well.

There is at least 1 good reason to create a partition. Depending on the cluster size of the file system you are using it can increase performance to have smaller clusters (depending on what you're doing). This is something that you need to do some analysis on before just making a rash decision. For instance doing Video editing is better with larger clusters as the files are huge, having massive numbers of smaller files (millions) can waste a lot of space on that same drive. It's a trade off between speed and granularity. A file will take at least 1 cluster on the disk, if the files average 50 or better of the size of the cluster then you won't be wasting space and the file system should be reasonably efficient.

Bill