Harddisc Partioning

O

outop49

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Can one of you clever okes assist please.

Are there any advantages or disadvantages to partition a 160 GB harddrive into three drives of 20 40 and 100 Gig each to accommodate you OS, Apps and Data respectively?

Thanx a lot for your advice.
 
Well I'd recommend two partitions only, let's say your hdd speed is 50mb/s if you create another partition the speed is halved, so it's 25mb/s, so that's the disadvantage, it's better to create only 2 partitions to maximize speed, if you decide to create more be ready for some crawling ;)
 
i always have three

one for my appz/games
one for my music
one for my os

if i ever have to formatted then i have all my info saved already

its a mission trying to save 160 gb hdd if you have format
 
Get two seperate HDD rather.

I've got 4 hdd in my pc (320gb + 2x 200gb + 20 gb)

OS + Apps
Data
MP3's / Movies

ps. and i'm outa space again ! :D
 
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Uh

teraside said:
Well I'd recommend two partitions only, let's say your hdd speed is 50mb/s if you create another partition the speed is halved, so it's 25mb/s, so that's the disadvantage, it's better to create only 2 partitions to maximize speed, if you decide to create more be ready for some crawling ;)
Click to expand...


Where does that skew theory come from :D
You certainly won't be halving speed by partitioning it like that!
 
Wanna bet? Take the test and partition your hdd into 4 sections, run a speed test prior and see what the speed difference is.
 
LOL... thats funny... it doesnt' change anything really, just makes your HDD's more manageable.
 
teraside said:
Well I'd recommend two partitions only, let's say your hdd speed is 50mb/s if you create another partition the speed is halved, so it's 25mb/s, so that's the disadvantage, it's better to create only 2 partitions to maximize speed, if you decide to create more be ready for some crawling ;)
Click to expand...

Pardon??? Can you please explain that more?

The main benefit (for me) with partitioning a large disk, is shorter defrag times. If you're defragging a single partition, the job can take an age. With 2 or 3 partitions, you can do each at a different time.

I'm also in favour of 3, used for OS, apps and data. Since 160Gb drives are tyically actually 149Gb (in true Gb terms, which most OS's apply), I'd go with 29Gb for the OS, and 60gb each for Apps and Data.
 
If you read what I said you would've understood, I'm saying that partitioning the drive into more partitions decreases it's overall speed, I'm not arguing the benifits of a partitioned drive, there are many benifits and I agree with what you say, it's something I learned about a month ago, viewing another forum, the dude had hdd speed problems and had 4 partitions, when doing a speed test the drive did like 11mb/s on each partition, when adding the speed of all the partitions he came to the value of his full harddrive speed, it could be a once off event, but I doubt it. ;)
 
could you please send me a link to the thread so that I may check it out. I haven't ever heard of anything like this, but it could just be the way that the speed program works.

Did he try the same speed tests with the same hard drive and only one main partition? How did these results compare?
 
teraside said:
If you read what I said you would've understood, I'm saying that partitioning the drive into more partitions decreases it's overall speed, I'm not arguing the benifits of a partitioned drive, there are many benifits and I agree with what you say, it's something I learned about a month ago, viewing another forum, the dude had hdd speed problems and had 4 partitions, when doing a speed test the drive did like 11mb/s on each partition, when adding the speed of all the partitions he came to the value of his full harddrive speed, it could be a once off event, but I doubt it. ;)
Click to expand...
He probably did a speed test on all four partitions at the same time

Otherwise, it's BS (no offence intended)

I've been using 3 partitions on my hard drives for about 4 years now, and haven't seen any performance disadvantage.
 
I can't see how speed can be affected on a single controller. Multiple drives on multiple controllers will improve speed. But unless your apps are very disk intensive it's unlikely you'll notice the difference.
 
I've similarly *never* heard of partitions causing a drive's speed to be reduced significantly. I have a 160Gb SATA300 which contains 3 NTFS partitions and 3 Linux partitions (1 swap, 2 X ext3) and have not experienced speed issues when copying to or from this disk to my other SATA300 disk.
 
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Well there's the dude's test results, click on techexpress link, then test details and scroll down to drive letters, I use these tests myself and they test the whole drive ;)
 
perhaps the test is flawed, but so far everybody concurs...absolute rubbish that multiple partitions slow down a hdd.

and if you look at the dudes test results, he has multiple results saved, and it look slike he still has multiple partitions and seems to be happy with it that way...

as I said, it may just be the way that particular test shows the results/ tests the drive etc. But it isnt for real.
 
Well, I don't have multiple partitions, so I can't comment on the speed out of personal experience, I'll take the collective comments of all you guys and apply to my thick skull :D MORE PARTITIONS DON'T DECREASE SPEED! happy? I learn too guys, so I apologize ;)
 
For these results to mean anything, you need to have tested the exact same hardware with and without partitions. He is comparing an IDE drive without partitions with a SATA drive with partitions. Now it might be that it does slow it down or maybe it doesn't, but until a test is done with the same hardware and the only change being the partitions we'll never know.

Just something to look out for in hardware tests and reviews ;)

Also just noted that the drives that are running at 55MB/s are completely empty where as the slower partitions aren't. Just another thing that may have an influence.
 
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Thank you for your input

I think I was not to far off from doing the right thing. It may just be that the pleasure from shorter back-ups and defragging may make up for the bit of time the slower drive will take.
 
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