How many partitions?

[Guest]

How many partitions should I make for a 75 GB IBM 75GXP HDD?

<font color=green>Modern art, is it art? Nope, I realized, some things are just stupid.</font color=green>

 

[Arrow]

What are you planning to use your system for?
Dual booting? System and data?
In any case, I'd recommend at least 2 or 3 partitions.

Rob
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[Guest]

hmm, I will only have one OS (as far as I have planned) and that is Win 2000 Pro...

but I was told that with anything less than 9 or 10 partitions I would be looking at substantial space waste

<font color=green>Modern art, is it art? Nope, I realized, some things are just stupid.</font color=green>

 

[Lars_Coleman]

By partitioning you are trying to lower the cluster size so you can use more space of the hard drive. So therefor the more partitions the smaller the cluster size. I really don't think you are going to lose to much space that this is really going to be important. I may be wrong and some ppl may look at it differently ....

Hope that helps ..

<font color=green>"Your call will be answered by the next available Tech Support representative"</font color=green>

 

[ejsmith2]

Uhhhhhhh.....
If you're using win2k, and NTFS, you can get 4k clusters with 20gig partitions. I've never tried anything larger, so I don't know the limit. Try to keep close to 4k clusters, unless you are only going to have REALLY large files (>650mb) on the partition.

 

[Lars_Coleman]

Partition Size ---- Cluster Size
512mb to 8191mb 4K
8192mb to 16383mb 8K
16384mb to 32767mb 16K
Larger then 32768mb 32K

That is just for Fat32. I have also noticed that Windows2000 only supports 32gig partitions. I don't have any documentation on that but I have seen it alot.

Check out Document # Q140365 for the Default Cluster Sizes within WindowsNT and Windows 2000.

Hope that gives a you a better Idea. New information to me, so I hope it helps you guys also.

<font color=green>"Your call will be answered by the next available Tech Support representative"</font color=green>

 

[Guest]

here's your documentation for fat32 support in Win2k

<A HREF="http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q184/0/06.ASP?LN=EN-US&SD=gn&FR=0&qry=32 fat32&rnk=1&src=DHCS_MSPSS_gn_SRCH&SPR=WIN2000" target="_new">http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q184/0/06.ASP?LN=EN-US&SD=gn&FR=0&qry=32 fat32&rnk=1&src=DHCS_MSPSS_gn_SRCH&SPR=WIN2000</A>

***check the jumpers 1st then check em again***

 

[Guest]

Hi Jay!

how many partitions you should use and with what clustersize depends very much on how you will use it.
but here are some things you might consider before you partion the drive.
- if you work with large files (video etc.) make a partion where you store them and use a large clustersize. the performance goes up then since the file doesn't have to be put into so many clusters. read and write will be faster. but this works really only for large files (50MB and up). with smaller files you will waste disc space only.
- the first partition (C should not be bigger than 3GB.
reason: your OS is on this one and most likely the swap file as well, means you will defragment the drive on a regular base to keep the performance up. a bigger drive means more time for defrag.
- consider a small partition (about 1GB or 2GB) at the end of the drive to store important programs like drivers etc.
depends on what you do with your computer but you might have to reinstall the OS more than once and it's very handy to have all the other drivers for printer and so on handy on a partition instead of trying to find all those CD's. it's easier to have the latest downloaded driver there anyway and it installs way faster from the drive then from a CD. but don't forget to backup now and then, the drive could fail and the drivers would be lost as well.
I even have the winCD copied to this partion. so in case I need to reinstall I don't have to look for the CD.
- have a separate partion for the data of your programs.
most programs install on the C: drive by default. even though you can change that most times you have to reinstall them after reinstalling the OS clean (formating the C: drive), because the registry entries of the programs are lost as well. having the data on a different partition means you don't have to backup them and rebuilt them as well. just point the reinstalled program to the data partition.
this are just some thoughts I had before I partioned my HDD.
I have 5 partions on it now (win98se/win2k dualoot system)

respect!

 

[Pettytheft]

I just posted a link to a article on this in another thread a minute ago. It gives a decent breakdown. It's for Win98 but I use something similar to it for Win2k.
Check it out

http://www.maximumpc.com/reprint/clean_start/index.html