Do partitions affect speed?

M

Manaknight

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I am setting up my home theater pc, i would like to dual boot my O/S (xp/vista)off the same sata II 320 gb drive and use the rest for dvd image storage and some games that i want to play on my plasma.

what i was wondering, will having those disks stored on a different logical partition from the boot partition while being on the same physical drive hurt performance in any realistic way, i will be playing both dvd AND hd-dvd off the hard disk. I was wondering if i should just buy a second sata drive and have one for dual boot then a second completely for data. I would rather not go this route due to finances but if logical partitions hurt too much i will
 
if you are constantly moving data between the partitions, then yes. The heads need to move more on average. It really depends on a lot of factors, so it is hard to make a general statement.
 
i'll give it a shot and see how it functions by using the same hd dvd image on the logical and on the partition with the windows and then with it on a seperate smaller ide drive and see how they stack up
 
Not a good idea. If you want to partition the space to boot XP / Vista, fine. If you want one partition for the OS and another partition on the same disk for other storage - this will generally lead to more seeks which are the slowest operation on a drive.
Get a second drive for data and use your other drive with 1 XP partition and 1 vista partition.
 
The first partition created on a hard drive will have access to the fastest part of the hard drive.
Data storage space passes the read/write head faster on the outer edges of the disk platters so the read/write speed will be faster if the data is placed on the outer edges of the platters.

Read/write speeds can halve at the centre of the disk compared to the outer edges.
Run a program like HDTune to see the difference in speed as you progress from the outer to the inner edges of the platters.
 
I would definitely put the OS you expect to use the most in the first partition. Then the second OS, and then the Data partition.

If you are going to use it as a general HTPC, you should be fine. If you expect to be doing alot of video editing or conversions, you would definitely benefit from a separate data drive.

Then again, if you are going to be playing with very many DVDs or recording anything in HD, you will find yourself crunched for space very quickly. My SD Tivo has a 500 gig drive just for TV and we are not crunched. The old 170 drive was very tight on space. We have 75 season passes though. I would suggest more drive capacity in a HTPC.

Don
 
yeah i got the idea of space. i am going to be running a lot of it through my shared gigabit network,
 
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