Does the 80% rule apply to partitions like it does to hard drives?

[Feliks]

The general rule of thumb (some say 50%, most say not anymore) is that you shouldn't use more than 80% of your drive space or performance will decrease. Does the same rule apply to partitions ("if you use more than 80% of your 2nd partition, speed will decrease") or no, only to the drive as a whole?

 

[photonboy]

1) First of all, this applies to SSD's not hard drives.

2) With SSD's this is a GRADUAL process, and proper setup would be to set that space aside using OVER PROVISIONING and then you can use up to 100% of the remaining, accessible (by you) space.

3) No idea where 50% came from... that's just not true.

4) Performance drop means slower data access... which for a game is about LOAD TIMES of game or later loads. It would not affect game play since the data would be copied into system and video memory during the load process.

5) Partition vs whole drive?
Again, this is for SSD's only. If you don't OP then any part of the SSD can, over time, become slower to access which is true if you partition or if you don't.

Again though, apply OP and it shouldn't be an issue. An SSD can also slow down due to lack of TRIM support due to older SSD, or older OS issue as well but that's a separate issue.

 

[photonboy]

Update:
*It's possible you are referring to the fact that hard drives are accessed quicker on the OUTER edge than they are on the INNER edge. in fact, it's almost exactly TWICE the time to access files on the inner edge vs outer edge.

That's why defrag programs also move the PAGEFILE, boot files etc to the OUTER edge and can also move more frequently used programs as well.

However, there's no hard dividing line... it just gets progressively slower as the data gets closer to the inner edge.

Partitioning:
If you partition a hard drive then I assume the first partition is from the OUTER edge inwards and the second partition continues in towards the INNER edge. Let's say it's a 2TB HDD so 1TB each partition if equal. Now, let's say Windows plus programs use 100GB (just over 10% of usable space after formatting etc).. then all the rest, just over 80% goes unused.

Then, if you add files to the SECOND partition the fastest they can be accessed is perhaps 75% of the speed on the very OUTER edge (whatever it works out to at that point) since they'll be on the furthest point from the INNER edge that's still part of that partition.

Hope I haven't confused.

Other:
I would ONLY partition a hard drive if putting an OS on the first partition. Otherwise it's just best to keep a single partition and simply add folders since then all data can be moved to the fastest part of the drive.

Sometimes it's nice to keep the OS separate from other data, especially if you might clone the OS partition to a smaller SSD later which wouldn't work if everything was on one partition (like Steam games or whatever).

 

[Feliks]

I'm booting multiple OSs off of an SSD which is why I need to partition it.


1) I meant the 80% rule for SSDs however I heard the 50% rule for HDDs before, probably because by that point everything would be heavily fragmented. I don't know, maybe I read it wrong or the person I read it from was wrong
3)^That's why the 50% rule was there
4)Yeah by performance drops I don't mean anything to do with gaming as in FPS; I mean slower boot times, loading screens, etc. aka decreased performance of the actual SSD.
5) Okay so here's the thing

i was planning to partition my SSD (a triple boot, i know it's an ambitious adventure but I believe it's doable) as such:
30GB minimum for OSX (a fresh install of OSX is about 15 GB)
80GB (Will this be enough or do I need more? I need a straight answer but it looks like it will be enough) for Windows 8
30GB for Arch Linux
80 GB for Storage/Games (NOT many)/Programs
(20GB of that^ will be empty space so that I don't use >80% of the SSD's space).

*Does that look like a decent partition set up or do i need to alter anything?
*and that's why I asked the original question because some partitions like the Arch one are tinier and therefore I didn't know if i used too much of that partition if it would slow down.