My machine is not behaving as I would like, I think there are some software peculiarities going on, so I plan to reinstall Windows. When I first installed I made the Rookie error of not partitioning my drives. Anyway due to a household tidy up I have the following drives available to me. 1 x 500gb Western Digital WD5000AAKS-75YGAO 7200rpm 3.5" SATA 1 x 160gb Hitachi HTS725016A9A364 7200rpm 2.5" SATA 1 x 250gb Seagate ST3250823AS 7200rpm 3.5" SATA (Possibly dodgy need to run a thorough HDD scan on it) 1 x 250gb can't remember what 7200rpm 3.5" IDE 1 x 160gb Seagate ST3160215ACE 7200rpm 160gb 3.5" IDE Other various less than 80gb IDE I have been looking at partition sizes for Win 7 and get contrasting information. I was thinking the following setup 500gb SATA: 50gb OS partition, 450gb apps partition 250gb IDE: Videos 250gb SATA (if it is good)/160gb SATA otherwise: Music/Photos Would this give me the best use of my disks at the best performance , or should I be thinking of something else? Thanks in advance
i personally don't partion my drives, if i want seperate storage area i add a second drive 64bit win7 could easily run out of space with only 50gb partition. your videos would be better on the sata drive rather than ide, music/photos would be ok on ide. you could keep the 500gb as one partions for apps etc, and use the 160gb for windows
I never partition... instead I always dedicate a decently sized and fast drive to Windows and programs. A second drive for downloads or games depending on what the machine is for, and the other drives for data/media storage. That way everything is physically separated for best performance and convenience. If windows screws up, or the drive blows, that's all I need to play with, nothing else gets touched.
Yes I agree with this; I have Windows 7 and some apps on a 64GB M4 and all my personal files on a 1TB Spinpoint F3. Nice contribution there mate
160 Gb SATA for Windows. 250 Gb for applications, downloads, documents. 500 Gb for video 160 Gb for music, photos, etc. IMHO dunx P.S. Only one of my PC's has only one drive, and I don't trust it with anything that isn't duplicated on one of the others...
Same here. I buy drives with an intended purpose. Fast smallish drives for OS, programs, recording and large "slow" drives for storage
Partician size for windows 7 is mainly dependant on what you intend on doing with your user folders or data. I would at least give it 100GBs with room for required programs like Adobe reader,ect. Yes do partician the drive. Your harddrives are a mishmash of performance but if thats what you have to work with itll work. WD blue would be my OS choice and app drive. Any IDE drive is going to be slow, so for video I would use another drive. It would be ok for photos and music. I see you are looking at a samsung spinpoint for upgrades. Personaly, take a look at WD black 640 GB or 750 GB drives in a raid 0. Nice perfomance boost. Cheap to. They are always on sale at the EGG. Keeping your drives the same will insure allround performance. There are many benifits to particianing a drive, one is to keep the OS in a managable space so OS information does not spread out over a large drive slowing things down. Second is drive defragging. That way you only need to defrag whats needed. Third is doing backups or ghosting. You can back up just the OS partician. Fourth the fastest part of the drive is the first part of the disk. Also known as short stroking. Fifth, data management. Who wouldnt want a drive dedicated to music Or how about My Photos? Sure make backups easy.
with as many drives the op has he would be better not to partition a drive, but to keep all the drives as single drives, and use the 160gb sata drive for windows, and some apps that refuse to work from alternate drives, the ide drive would be better placed for music and photos, and the bigger sata drives for video, and apps
having the OS on its own partition is an excellent plan, i cant believe more of you dont do it. personally, i have my OS on a 60GB partition on my 640GB WD black. the other ~580GB has my program files folder on it so all games and applications are installed in a separate space from the OS. this way if the OS crashes, most of my data will be retained. all of my media and pictures are on my RAID1.
He's in the UK, we don't get EGG here. But know what you mean. There are pro's and con's to partioning, it's down to personal preference. I have the OS and apps on a 160Gb, and 2x1Tb, one for data, other for media (music, video, etc). And a 3rd ext drive for backing up anything really important like image back ups. And just bought a NAS box to store centrally used files for the network.
it's not that good an idea, say something wants to access something from the os, and the application partition, it will impact performance more, as the head has to sweep across different parts of the disk more often. a better idea is as we have advised above as the op has enough drives to do it.
the heads will be sweeping the same amount regardless of partitioning. my OS occupies the first 50-odd GB of my disk and my applications folder starts at 60GB (where the OS partition ends). theres a 10GB buffer zone that the heads have to pass over, thats all. and it helps protect applications from problems with the OS, keeps things organized, helps reduce fragmenting, and speeds up the OS (short stroking).
I have 2 x 160Gb HDDs arranged in 5 partitions each. The OS has its own partition, as do the applications, and the files of these applications, documents and music have their own partitions. The OS is on a different physical drive than the swapfile, data and recovery files.
The performance benefits of partitioning are being somewhat oversold here - the first partition on a hard disk may not necessarily be the fastest (I've encountered cases where it was the slowest - suggesting the disk had sectors arranged from the centre outwards) and the programs most in need of "fast space" are likely to be games rather than OS components. Security can be enhanced via partitioning but only if NTFS permissions are set accordingly (e.g. setting Writes to Deny for non-admins on C:\) and a non-admin user selected for day-to-day use. This means the pagefile and hibernation file (if used) must be relocated off the OS partition. The biggest benefit I would suggest is in backups and restores. With the OS on a separate partition, it can be "rolled back" using an earlier backup without affecting programs. However User data (which will include most games' configuration and saves) needs to be relocated (along with the programs folders) off the OS partition beforehand.
I find partitioning to be absolutely essential for my PC. I run dual boot Linux and Windows, but I also switch Windows versions when a new one comes out (so do most of us on bit-tech I think). OS overwriting is so much easier if the things you want to keep are on a separate partition. I personally separate my drive (1TB) as follows: 100GB to OS alone 285GB to games - I use a lot 75GB to programs (although it didn't bring much benefit, next time I will put them in with the OS) 535GB to extended (moar partitions!) - 475GB to data (all documents, music, pictures and videos) - 53GB to Linux - 8GB to swap (Linux page file) - 2GB to bootloader The separate bootloader partition is really useful, because I have a habit of corrupting Linux (with GRUB on it) and then booting from USB for the next 6 months.
Heretic! Linux partitions should exceed Windows' as an act of worship. Sounds like GRUB's gotten fat since I last dealt with it.
