Do you still partition your HDs? (1 Viewer)

[Scott L]

I didn't think there was any use to it anymore but I've heard it's a good idea to do it on a big drive so it will have lower seek times. I notice when I open my 120gb HD it takes a couple of seconds for the files to appear. And once in a blue moon I have to worry about skipped frames capturing to huffyuv, I start getting concerned when I hear the drive spinning around like crazy doing two things at once.

I'm about to reinstall XP with two 120gb drives. Would doing 3 paritions (about 40gb each) on each drive be ideal or would 2 be enough for performance gains (60gb each)? Thanks for any help.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

I think performance issues are negligible. However keeping the OS away from your own data means greater resiliance when problems arise. If you use Ghost or DriveImage for backups, partitioning becomes essential.

 

[MikeMcNertney]

Keeping your drive defragmented should have a bigger performance impact than partitioning, though partitioning can help in the sense that it makes defragmenting faster.

Partitioning itself shouldn't have much of an effect on performance. No matter how many partitions the drive has, it can only read from one spot at a time. These days partitioning is mostly useful for your own organization, and to allow you to backup whole partitions

 

[Christ Reynolds]

i dont mean to hijack the thread, but i have a related question. if i partition my 200 gb hd into two 100s, will i be able to get around the 137gb barrier? is it a barrier on the partition or the disk itself? i like to freshly install windows often, and windows update always gives me problems. i'd be willing to split up the drive if i could just have the thing up and working right away.
when capturing, do you have other things running in the background?

CJ

 

[Francois Caron]

Christ, the 137 GB barrier usually indicates you have an outdated BIOS revision. Check your motherboard manufacturer's Web site to see if there's a BIOS update that resolves this issue.

As for partitioning, I always recommend keeping the operating system and the data on separate partitions. If you ever need to reinstall the operating system, you won't lose all of your data when you reformat the operating system's partition.

 

[Patrick_S]

I'm still a big fan of creating at least a separate partition for the page file.

 

[ChadLB]

No matter how big my hard drive is I always make it into partitions. The key is to have the OS on like maybe 20gs for the OS and programs. Then I ghost this. That way if my OS pukes I still have all my other info and just ghost that 20g partition. Easiest and safest solution for me.

 

[Christ Reynolds]

before i had multiple hard drives, i had everything on one partition and it bit me in the ass. from then on, i always kept the OS and my goodies on seperate partitions.

CJ

 

[Diallo B]

BIG BUMP!!!

doing this saved my life today.

 

[Paul_Sjordal]

The big reason people used to partition their drives had to do with storage efficiency in the older FAT system. This isn't much of an issue with newer file systems like FAT32, NTFS, and so on. The next vesion of Windows will come with yet another file system, so I'm sure the issue of storage efficiency will be even less of an issue.

There is another good reason to partition your drive, and that is to prevent fragmenting of your swap file. However I don't think most modern compures use virtual memory very often, so this isn't much of an issue anymore either.

I used to reilgiously partition my drives for the above reasons and for organizational reasons, but honestly it doesn't seem worth the effort anymore so I don't bother.

 

[Paul_Sjordal]

Lazy whipper-snapper! Why in my day we installed operating systems uphill both ways! You kids don't know how easy you have it!

 

[Diallo B]

Well Paul,

I thank you old geezers for making it easy on us young whipper snappers by teaching us to work smarter not harder.

also, i don't think there is any good argument why anyone would not want to construct a partition exclusively for the OS. unless you just don't feel like it or don't know how. in which case you should probably figure out haste makes waste and make the partition or learn to make it.

 

[StephenL]

You must install XP SP1 unless your Windows XP CD includes it. Follow your hard drive's installation instructions carefully. Drives larger than 137GB may require one of the following: Windows XP SP1 and a registry patch, Ultra ATA/133 PCI card, or a compatable motherboard chipset. When I installed Maxtor 160GB and 250GB drives, my computers required installation of MaxBlast software and the EnableBigLBA registry patch to avoid data loss.

 

[Christ Reynolds]

well i am already using a 200gb hd on my machine, using an ata133 card with xp sp1, but i have yet to install the new bios that supports the 137gb hd. so i guess my question was, even when i install the new bios (which will be tough with the floppy drive adapter on my mobo not working) i will still have to install xp sp1 as well, right? (if i do a reformat and reinstall in the future, that is) i was hoping that the new bios would take care of any issues ragarding the barrier in windows as well. wishful thinking i guess. i may not even install the new bios then. if only i had one of the newer motherboards that i could flash the bios within windows

CJ

 

[Scott L]

The simple way not to fragment your pagefile is to set the initial and maximum size the same. Make sure it is one big green chunk on Windows' defragmenting program. It should stay in the same place until you format again.