Partition a 1TB HDD

[ClownWalker]

Hey guys! I just bought a HDD for my guild. It's the Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB 7200Rpm 64Mb Cache SATA III 6Gp/s.
Some people told me it that if I'd partition my HDD into 4 250Gb parts, it would increase the writing and reading performance because the computer wouldn't have to search for specific files on all the 1TB drive.

So what do you guys think? Since it's the only drive of storage I got, should I partition it or not?

 

[nhasian]

files are indexed on the drive by default so it doesnt matter how many partitions it has. I personally would not partition it. If it was a 3TB drive that would be a different story.

 

[ClownWalker]

files are indexed on the drive by default so it doesnt matter how many partitions it has. I personally would not partition it. If it was a 3TB drive that would be a different story.

So, you're telling me that the drive, 500gb or 1tb, will read and write files at the same speed. Or there may be a difference, but so small that I wouldn't notice it in real time?

 

[tsnor]

You will get BETTER performance if you do *not* partition the drive.

The read/write heads have to physically move to the correct track to read data, and then the data spins under the head as the disk rotates.

File systems place data on the disk to minimize the physical movement of the read/write heads.

When you partition the disk you are creating separate chunks that have separate file systems. If, for example, you copied a file from one partition to another the head need to move to one area to read the data and then to another area to write it. This movement cannot be optimized by the file system. Likewise when you move files from one directory to another in the same partition the file system can just update pointers. When you move files from one partition to another the actual data needs to be copied.

 

[tsnor]

So, you're telling me that the drive, 500gb or 1tb, will read and write files at the same speed. Or there may be a difference, but so small that I wouldn't notice it in real time?

Different parts of a drive read/write at different speeds. You can see this really clearly if you look at an HDTUNE performance sweep across the disk. The physical mechanism is that the part of the disk that is near the center of the spinning disk goes under the head more slowly then the parts of the disk that are on the outer part of the disk, but the bit density is the same so the faster moving parts of the disk deliver better read/write performance. (Download and run HDTUNE)

The DISK doesn't know how it's partitions. The DISK will read/write data with the same performance no matter how the drive is partitioned. Any performance change you see will be because the file system is sending different requests to the disk when it is partitioned differently. And these would tend to favor the single large disk over the multiple partitions.

p.s Nice drive. That's a fast one.

p.p.s. Consider a backup strategy. A simple external USB drive could be the center of your strategy. Or if this disk is goign to be the second drive in your PC you could back up critical data to the first drive. If the amount of data is small then you could back up to Amazon cloud storage (first 5GB free) etc.

 

[ClownWalker]

Different parts of a drive read/write at different speeds. You can see this really clearly if you look at an HDTUNE performance sweep across the disk. The physical mechanism is that the part of the disk that is near the center of the spinning disk goes under the head more slowly then the parts of the disk that are on the outer part of the disk, but the bit density is the same so the faster moving parts of the disk deliver better read/write performance. (Download and run HDTUNE)

The DISK doesn't know how it's partitions. The DISK will read/write data with the same performance no matter how the drive is partitioned. Any performance change you see will be because the file system is sending different requests to the disk when it is partitioned differently. And these would tend to favor the single large disk over the multiple partitions.

p.s Nice drive. That's a fast one.

p.p.s. Consider a backup strategy. A simple external USB drive could be the center of your strategy. Or if this disk is goign to be the second drive in your PC you could back up critical data to the first drive. If the amount of data is small then you could back up to Amazon cloud storage (first 5GB free) etc.

Well, I just bought a Seagate 500Gb External drive so I guess I can use it for backup.

 

[tsnor]

Well, I just bought a Seagate 500Gb External drive so I guess I can use it for backup.

"... a HDD for my guild." excellent. losing guild data if the WD drive fails would be a pain.

 

[acerace]

If it were me, I would partition the 1 TB into 2 partitions. Simply because if I have to format the OS, I will not have to use external HDD, just move it to the second partitions.

Now, if the drive fails or corrupted, that's a different story.

 

[ClownWalker]

Best answer selected by ClownWalker.