What to put on each partition?

[DaWheelo]

I have a 500gb hard drive, but currently dont have any partitions, all my data is just on the one drive. I'm about to make a partition for around 150GB. What should I have on the 150GB, and what should I have on the remaining 350GB? All help is greatly appreciated. Thank you.

 

[RaDiKaL_]

Personally I leave my OS and some essential programs on my C: partition. while games, music, videos, documents etc on my D: partition. This way if my OS were to fail I simply use a backup image I created earlier with Acronis to restore my C: partition without the need to reinstall all my games nor worrying about if my documents are retrievable since they are not in the same partition as the OS.

But really it all comes down to one's preferences.

 

[DaWheelo]

Personally I leave my OS and some essential programs on my C: partition. while games, music, videos, documents etc on my D: partition. This way if my OS were to fail I simply use a backup image I created earlier with Acronis to restore my C: partition without the need to reinstall all my games nor worrying about if my documents are retrievable since they are not in the same partition as the OS.

But really it all comes down to one's preferences.

Im talking in terms of performance. What would you recommend if one was to use partitioning to increase performance?

 

[jsmithepa]

Im talking in terms of performance. What would you recommend if one was to use partitioning to increase performance?

There is no performance difference whatsoever.

The HD, no matter how many partitions you make it, still has ONE R/W armature, and it can only service one-request-at-a-time. While it's talking to C: any D: request will have to wait and viceversa.

With two physical drives, NOW we are talking. Now you have two independent R/W armature which can service your request in parallel. Get the picture?

 

[spdragoo]

Little to no performance improvement. Whether it's a single partition or 10 partitions, they're just logical ways of dividing up the same physical drive. It's like reading through a book that uses the standard chapter/page/paragraph format, versus a book that omits the chapter separators. It's still a single book, & you still have to flip through it to find the page you're looking for. Chapters can help you organize it more effectively, but they don't help you read it any faster.

Mainly, what it's going to do is allow you to better organize your files & apps on the hard drive. Setting up 2 partitions helps you track better what's taking up your storage space, & gives you a better handle on when you might need to add more storage in the future.

If you're looking to improve your performance, you'd be better off adding a 2nd drive. Even if you don't go for the standard primary SSD/secondary HDD combo, a 2nd HDD gives you an opportunity to put your apps & other regularly-accessed files onto the faster drive, while keeping your main data files on the slower drive. I did that before I went SSD -- used a WD Blue for my apps & main files, & a WD Green (slower, low-power drive) for my secondary files/backup/"other" files. Now, I have a 3-drive system: SSD for OS & certain apps, WD Black ("faster" drive) for the majority of my apps & primary data files (music, pictures, etc.), & WD Blue ("regular" drive) for my backups & secondary files.