Partition Question

[fubz]

Well i aquired a new 200gb HD over black friday, now i need to install it and partition it up! Few questions.

1. HD 80gb 7200rpm - has windows install

2. HD 200gb 7200rpm - gonna put games onto

How could i partition these and install stuff for the optimal performance. I know i want Windows on one and my games on the other (right?). Then what about Page File, Right now i have a 2gb partition on my small HD that is gingto be replaced by the 200gig. Should i put the page file back in the beggining of that one, and put that games after it, or put the games on the front of the drive?

Then i have music - 20gb (i dont have that much)

Then there are programs i randomly download... should i make a partiton for them on the second HD or the first HD so i can easily whipe them out to keep my windows install as clean as possible?

Sorry i dont know much about it... would love your suggestions

[Honda_Boy]

You have XP right. You can just install the drive boot to windows and go into MY Computer and format the drive from there.

[fubz]

i know that....

[Honda_Boy]

What i'm saying is windows makes partitions with everything ya need to start with, i'd steer clear o f makin a bunch of partitions cause that is just a pain. I have only 1 per drive on each of my machines. Every single one with an OS on it. I usually just make folders for each category.

Edited November 26, 2005 by Honda_Boy

[shanenin]

Right now i have a 2gb partition on my small HD

shows you what I know. I did not even know people made a seperate partition for a pagefile. I doubt you get much of a perfomance gain, especially if you have plenty of ram already.

Edited November 26, 2005 by shanenin

[CurlingSteve]

Personally, I've never seen any benefit/gain from having a separate page file partition, regardless of its positioning.

Even where performance was reported improved, the gains weren't worth the effort (in my opinion).

Most systems with 512 MB of RAM or more rarely need to swap to the page file.

For heavy gaming raise that "no swapping" RAM requirement to (say) 1 GB.

-----------

As far as partitioning for other reasons, I do partition my main drive into:

1) Operating System and Programs - 25% or 30 GB (minimum)

2) Data - remainder

Additional drive I organize with folders, not by partitioning.

Separating the OS from data on the main drive make clean reinstalls easier.

Edited November 26, 2005 by CurlingSteve

[xxkbxx]

I've found it easier in the past just to not worry with partitioning everything unless you do extremely specialized work

[Pete_C]

As for a seperate partition for the page file, while some versions of windows benefitted from this; windows XP when installed on an NTFS partition and using the built in defrag based on diskkeeper does not. It will place the various components, including the pagefile for optimum performance without you doing anything.

As for why you would want to partition; have you ever tried to do a thorough scandisk of 200GB? Or even a defrag or full virus scan of say 40GB of data? It takes forever. And you can't just pause something like that and resume tomorrow. So by partitioning your drive you can keep your Operating system partition optimized (defrag, and error checking) and checked for viruses and malware easily and fairly quickly; then if you detect a problem there (since it will be most likely to be recieving the most use and that is where viruses etc will install first in most cases) you can do others later. It also lets you have a small enough operating system partition on one drive that you can just create a ghost file on the other for quick restore if there is ever a major problem.

So all things other than the size being similar I would have partitioned the 80GB drive with 20-30GB for OS and programs. Then split the balance for data which is best kept on the same drive (things like folders for say Nero to keep working copies of stuff when it converts something for burning) .

Then I would split the 200GB drive up into manageable partitions. 40-50GB max, with one saved for backups and a ghost image file of the OS partiton. Note that since you are just imaging the partition, it will not include the mbr so you would have to do a repair or recovery console fixboot and fixmbr after restoring it in some cases.

Do you absolutely need to partition? No , you can just use the two drives as is. Or you could use the software included with the new drive to clone the old one to it and then wipe the old one.

[Besttechie]

I've found it easier in the past just to not worry with partitioning everything unless you do extremely specialized work

Hi,

I have to disagree. I disagree for a few reasons.

Partitioning is a great thing to do no matter what kind of stuff you do on your PC. It keeps things organized. It also decreases fragmentation on your hard drive, especially with the hard drives we have today, they're only getting bigger, therefore you don't have to defrag as often and it makes things quicker. Also, running scans such as AV's or Anti-spyware scans, on an unpartitioned drive that is 300GB, that would take a very long, compared to a drive that is partitioned. I recently bought a 300GB hard drive and I partitioned it up. Here's how I partitioned it:

30GB for the OS and Applications

30GB for Music

10GB for Docs and Pix

10GB for Program Installers

30GB for Video

40GB for Virtual Machines

And I still have a ton of unallocated space, that I can add to partitions as I need it or create new ones.

Overall, I think partitioning is a great thing to do no matter what you do on your PC. It does help.

B

[fubz]

Interesting informtion guys, thank you very much.