Getting the most out of my new HD

[CU]

I just got a WD Black 750gig drive to install Win7 on. For XP and what I was think of doing was creating a small say 40 gig partition for just Win7. The second partition would be the rest of the drive an hold all my data and other programs I install. Although after reading http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=442289 I have been thinking about doing it more like that. I small tmp partition, I don't use any program that would need a scratch disk, so maybe 10gigs? Then the OS partition with programs install ie a few games, so 200gigs. The the rest used for data. Do many people do this? Is it worth it? It sounds logical, and that it should help some. Also can Win7 or a free program change the partition sizes later if I find out I picked bad sizes?

 

[shiznit]

splitting a hard drive into many partitions hasn't benefited me over the years. It forces the heads to go from partition to partition very frequently, lowering performance and sometimes resulting in odd behavior (I/O-related stutter, freeze, at least in my case). Besides, HDDs get slower as you get to the center so you will actually hurt performance by putting often used programs on a partition farther away from the edge. If you have no other hard drives to use for temp folders and storage, I would at most make one extra partition near the end (closest to the center) to store files least hurt by low access times like music and video. That way if shit happens you can just reinstall windows over the first partition and not have to worry about backing up the media. What would be better would be to get relatively cheap SSD for the OS and apps, and use the WD for everything else.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Create two partitions and make a software raid 0. It will make it go faster, and because it's still one physical drive, you wont increase the chance of failure.

(no, this wont really work. )


In all seriousnous I find today's hard drives are very fast, there's no point in doing any special tweaking unless you are looking for very serious performance, in which case you'll want to look at raid arrays.

 

[CU]

Yeah the goal would be to keep my apps and OS on the outer tracks and my data in seperate partition, so I could blow away windows and still have my data. Although part of my data is saved game files, and some of those still save in the games install directory. Maybe I should just do one big parition for everything. Is that what most do? If SSD's were cheaper I would have bought that, but I would like to have atleast a 100+gig one. So, I will have to wait awhile.

 

[TXAngel08]

With the price of hard drives these days, buy a second and put your data there...

Or better yet, buy the 40GB Intel SSD for a boot drive and use this drive for data. (expensive, but once you've done it, you'll never EVER go back)