To partition or NOT to partion, that's my question..

[Microbman]

I'm dropping in a new MOBO and need to format my 2 HD's for several reasons including having a clean system for my new 1 G tbird. I want to use my 4 Gig for the OS and the 13 Gig for everything else. The smaller is an older drive. Should I partion aside from the sector for the OS? Sould I put Win98SE on the new drive? How large should the partitions be...I do a lot of gaming!? Do need to partition at all??? My current soon-to-be-replaced puter has the OS on the big drive and not partitioned out and runs great. Anyone have any advice???

 

[mmaki]

Here is what I do. Install you OS and Apps on your smaller primary drive. Depending on how big it is you can partition it for other OS's too. I would save at least 2-4G for this. Save you larger second drive for everything you create, all your data files, stuff that you can't replace if it is lost and back it up incrementally (say monthly) to CD-R. Ocassionally copy your e-mail address book, e-mail files, favorites, etc. there too. I take it one step further and use PowerQuest's disk imager and make an image of my primary partition once I have the OS and apps installed and running the way I like it. Now if I want to experiment with a new app and it crashes my system I can reinstall the image in about 10 minutes (OS, apps and all). This is what the new Windows Me is supposed to do, but I like having more control over it. I have not tried Me yet.

Good Luck!

Mike

 

[BadThad]

Partitioning Recommendations

 

[Souka]

DO NOT use the 4GB for your primary drive....it is probably much slower than the 13Gb drive.....
setting this 4gb drive up for apps and data will slow down just about every aspect of your system.....

Make the 13GB drive primary, 4GB drive secondary (d, using FAT32.

Use the 4GB drive for backups and storage of files you don't need much....like drivers n' stuff.


This my personal expience speaking, and support experience.........good luck!


At the very least, put each drive on it's own IDE channel as primary...make the CD-rom/zip/DVD the slave....



EDIT: badthad, I checked that link to partitioning recommendations....I disagree with his suggestions....two key points I quote: (he says to make 3 partitions on the drive).

1. "should your C: drive become badly corrupted, you can format C without losing your data!" Ugh, if the c: partition beconmes corruptetd, the other partitions will likely fail as well....the partition info is all stored in the same place...one goes, all three will likely go.

2. "The final partition or E DRIVE will use the 1 GB you saved back. This partition should be used for the "swap file" or...." This is sooo wrong minded. By putting the swapfile out on this partition, it's on the slowest part of the HD (1/3 less throughput..varies by drive)....and the heads will have to seek a full stroke everytime they need data further slowing down the HD. Keep swap on primary drive, set mininum size to like 128mb, max to whatever ya have. It's a good balance between static and dynamic....


Yeah yeah I"m not in a good mood.....tough

 

[Microbman]

Hey thanks guys this is all really valuable info. I,m thinkin tho that my smaller drive is older and I may not want to have it around at all anyway. I can put it in a rebuild or something. As long as I'm upgrading I may as well spend the xtra $$ and buy a new 30 G or whatever I can afford. It will at least be current and be able use UDMA features, faster transfer rates etc. At the very least the smaller older drive is toast. Even my 13 G Maxtor is 1 1/2 yr old now. Time to move on. Thanks again for ur help.

 

[NickC]

Hi Microbman: u might be on the right trail! Do not use the slowest drive as the Virtual memory or the OS as these should be on the fastest drive you have and that will be your new drive. (as a matter of fact his was good advice with windows 95 but as of the other OSes you really do not need another partition as these OSes do a good job of manging there own virtual mem.). Any backups could be on the slow drive. If you have data that is not used very often then that would be a good place for it. Any thing that is used frenquently definately needs to be on the new drive!!! One other thing I would do different is that I would put my programe on a different drive that my OS, I would not ever put my programs on the same partition as my OS as you will always have the possiblity of loosing some datta if they are on the same partition!!!

<B>I'm dropping in a new MOBO and need to format my 2 HD's for several reasons including having a clean system for my new 1 G tbird. I want to use my 4 Gig for the OS and the 13 Gig for everything else. The smaller is an older drive. Should I partion aside from the sector for the OS? Sould I put Win98SE on the new drive? How large should the partitions be...I do a lot of gaming!? Do need to partition at all??? My current soon-to-be-replaced puter has the OS on the big drive and not partitioned out and runs great. Anyone have any advice??? </B>

I do hope you have lots of luck with the MOBO!!!

 

[BadThad]

Souka - Everyone has their own opinions when it comes to hard drives. I respect them all.

1) Ugh, if the c: partition beconmes corruptetd, the other partitions will likely fail as well....the partition info is all stored in the same place...one goes, all three will likely go.

I'm taking about OS corruption, not errors in the FAT. Perhaps I need to clarify this. If the OS becomes badly corrupted, you can safely format c: without losing data.

2) &quot;The final partition or E DRIVE will use the 1 GB you saved back. This partition should be used for the &quot;swap file&quot; or....&quot; This is sooo wrong minded. By putting the swapfile out on this partition, it's on the slowest part of the HD (1/3 less throughput..varies by drive)....and the heads will have to seek a full stroke everytime they need data further slowing down the HD. Keep swap on primary drive, set mininum size to like 128mb, max to whatever ya have. It's a good balance between static and dynamic....

The difference in speed is largely irrelevant since most of todays systems have a large amounts of ram. The swap file is rarely used under most conditions. If it is utilized, there is no speed difference that is noticable to the user. Any benchmark tests I've ever read comparing throughput from the inner to outer drive tracks utilize a continous, sustain read of A LOT of data. While I do acknowledge there is a difference, swap file usage is not even similar, it's access is performed in bursts of a few milliseconds. My question, can you differentiate between 9 milliseconds and 90 milliseconds? Can you tell the difference in the swap file transfer of say 10MB of data at rate of 10 MB/s and 100 MB/s? Does it really matter? Personnally, I don't think so.

As far as having the swap file on your OS partition...IMO BAD. The swap file CANNOT be defragmented. Thus, if it's on your OS partition, then you cannot effectively defrag the most important part of the drive. IMO, a fragmented OS partition will effect performance 100x more when compared to the virtues of an inner/outer swap file. Worse yet is having it dynamic, this will only lead to additional fragmentation.

Fun Stuff!

 

[ebgb]

My real world observation regarding partitioning is that the extra drive letters tend to confuse people. Furthermore, especially on a crowded drive, the dynamic resizing of the swap file can quickly fragment the drive's contents. IMHO, simpler is better and a static swap file on another partition is just as well.

Here's what I do to keep my 'puters running trouble free. I create a small partition on the primary (largest) drive of a size twice that of my installed ram. I then install the O/S on the primary partition and move the swap file to the logical drive all by itself.
I size the swap file to the full size of the logical drive and make it static by specifying the same minimum and maximum sizes.
Then I finish up by defragging the primary partition.
What I end up with is a base system that will never fragment, a static swap file the same size as the logical drive, and one huge area of the primary partition to store stuff on.

This is simple, easy to take care of. May not be the fastest way to go, but once you set it up, you can forget it.