Hard drive partitioning preferences

[AlwaysWong]

For an everyday, general-use system, how many partitions do you prefer to use? ... and how big are they (percentage-wise)?

I'm going to build a new system and have already purchased an 80GB HD. I never had the luxury of thinking about so much storage space until now. I think 50% will be plenty for my main 'C' partition. Perhaps the 'D' will be 30% where I might install all games and some apps that I'll hardly use. The remaining 20% 'E' partition could just serve as my download dump.

I plan on running off of Win2K and obviously NTFS. Would I need to keep any my partitions FAT32?

Do you recommend me using more or less than 3 partitions? Different proportions?

Thanks for sharing,
u g n

 

[fr]

Many people keep their OS on a small partition and the rest on another.


I rather just have one drive, one partition and just multiple drives

 

[metallibloke]

My personal preference is to have most of the drive for the OS and apps (games in my case), and then one other partition of several gigabytes for personal files so i dont have to back them up somewhere else if i reinstall the OS.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

depends on the os

256MB-768MB for /var

few gigs for /usr

256MB for /tmp, 512 or 768MB for /

and the rest for /home

oh wait...

 

[thorin]

Originally posted by: fr
Many people keep their OS on a small partition and the rest on another.
I rather just have one drive, one partition and just multiple drives

Ya I agree with that (I run 2 20GB OS and everyday Apps on Primary, then Games Non-Everyday apps and MP3s on the other). However with his single 80 that likely isn't an option.

1) NTFS performance is slightly better, but if you toast your OS somehow then you need another 2k or XP system to salvage info from the drive or you have to reinstall the OS and pray.
2) I'd suggest ~10GB for OS and Everyday apps like Office and whatever email client you like and your browser of choice. A chunk for the rest of your apps and games (20gb maybe), then a huge chunk for dls and collections (mp3s, divx, whatever) and any crap your just friggin around with like an apache install or any programming work etc......

Thorin