How do you setup your hard drive?

R

RuSty13

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 1, 2004
Messages
184
So I am building a new computer soon, and I am considering buying a WD 1TB Hard drive.



In the past this is how I have setup my hard drives:
C: - Windows and System Files (80 GB)
D: - Storage – Movies, Music, Documents, Games, Downloads, etc (500gb)



Anytime I wanted to clean my computer I just re-formatted C:, installed windows, installed drivers, installed apps, and I'm good to go.



Now with my new computer I am considering getting a WD Caviar 1TB hard drive.
It seems to me like it would be unwise to install windows on the same drive where my 900GB's of files are, because what happens when I want to reformat?



What do you do?
Do you use partitions?
or setup like I described above?
or something else?


Please elaborate, thanks!




-RuSty
 
I partition 30GB for OS and then a single partition for whatever is leftover.

If Windows gets screwy, I only need to nuke one partition and I'll be right back to where I was. I've found that a repair installation doesn't seem to work too well for reasons unknown to me. Imaging and formatting seem to be mostly problem free.
 
Single drive with single partition for Windows. All data is stored or duplicated to WHS. So if the drive dies, which is will, I do'nt lose anything.

You're right to be afraid of putting all your data on one drive. Windows is not the only thing that can go south, the drive could die, the partition table could corrupt. Make sure you have a backup so that it doesn't matter what happens to your boot drive.
 
I never use partitions. I do however keep seperate drives for data. Usually in a RAID1 array, and two smaller drives for the OS and programs in RAID 0.

Right now:

2 300GB Velociraptors in RAID0 (OS/Programs/Games)
2 500GB Western Digital SE16s in RAID 1 (Important Data, pr0n, digital only copies of software etc.)

The page file is still kept on the RAID 0 array. I've never found an appreciable gain in performance by moving the page file to another drive in a modern machine. I used to do it back in the early Pentium days and abandoned the practice around the Pentium III time frame if I recall correctly.
 
If you only have one drive then make a reasonable sized partition for the OS and use the rest for programs and general storage.

Until recently I had Vista on my 2 640 GB Western Digital AAKS drives in RAID 0. I made a 160 GB partition for Windows and some major apps like office and left the rest as one big 1 TB partition for programs, although I use my SCSI raid for apps and scratch space most of the time.

Now I've got a 64 GB SSD for the OS, the AAKS drives in RAID for programs and storage, and the SCSI drives for games and scratch space. :)
 
35GB system partition (never larger, never smaller, for any OS)

The rest of whatever drive I'm using as the system/primary drive becomes a "storage" partition for all the good stuff.
 
I do the same as the first post i have a 160 gb for my os and a 320 gb for entertainment but i have ordered a wd 1tb so ill do it the same way
 
I always go single drive/single partition for my boxes and reuse one of my old smaller drives. Something between 160 - 250GB or smaller if I can find one. Anything bigger I make external or toss in a fileserver box.

I keep a few files that I would access often (like music from my favorite playlist) on the local drive with the OS so that I don't have the keep accessing the external drives for them.
 
Vista on a -160gb
XP Pro x64 on a -80gb
Ubuntu on a -120gb

media on a 400gb and a 640gb.

With all of my media and everything setup like that i can access everything from any OS i use.. and i dont have to really copy data from the OS drives to be able to format. Makes like easy!!
 
Generally, I do the following on system builds:

Raptors are unpartitioned due to their smaller size.

Non-Raptor system drives under 200gb are unpartitioned. Drives over 200gb get a 50-80gb OS partition and the rest for data.

Laptop drives over 40gb get a 40gb OS partition and the rest for data. Laptops 40gb and under are one partition.

Ideally, I like to build systems with a Raptor for the OS drive and a second physical disk for data.

The two Server 2003 setups I've done have one partition (146gb SCSI disks), and both have been RAID 1 setups.

WHS does it's own thing.

There are always exceptions as each person I build a pc for seems to have different skill levels (aka how easy can I fix theri pc) and different ideas about backing data up which can sometimes influence the partitioning scheme.
 
Since hard drives slow down as they're filled up, I'll only assign 40% of the hard drive space for the OS and leave the rest unpartitioned. This way I keep the drive clean and prevent it from getting filled up. I dump everything else on my Raid 5 array.
 
I have a 640GB drive for Windows and Applications (its the fast HD), and individual TB drives for music, videos, pictures, misc :)
 
I have a 250GB drive, 40GB for Vista, and the rest for programs and games. Music, movies, documents, etc. go on the file server.
 
Laptop running linux: 2GB swap, 10GB for /, rest of drive for /home, server for storage
Server: 20GB of my 500GB hard drive for OS, rest of 500GB for VMware drive images and picture folder backup, 1TB hard drive for storage
Netbook: 8GB SSD for OS, server for storage
 
ALL4AMD said:
no partition. check sig on setups

Click to expand...

Interesting. How do you use the hard drives since they require at least one partition to be usable? Are you using a live CD or something similar and just have the hard drives hooked up not doing anything? :p:rolleyes:

 
/dev/hda1 (C:) FAT32 about 2-4GB. Contains XP boot files, support files for system recovery, and pagefile.
/dev/hda2 (d:) NTFS 60GB-80GB. My main OS resides here. Used to be XP Pro. Currently transitioning to XP 64.
/dev/hda3 (e:) 20-ish GB Dual boot for the "test" OS I'm currently tinkering with, usually slackware, but currently XP64 (see above mentioned transition)
/dev/hda4. An extended partition containg the following logical drives:
(1) A 250GB NTFS partition called "Files". My Documents, etc, are remapped here. This is my backed up storage. This partition is the same size as my usb drive, and this partition gets backed up to said external drive about twice a month, or whenever substantial changes are made.
(2) My VM partition. This is an NTFS partition of at least 100GB, containing the virtual machines I use for testing a variety of things. This is not a backed up partition, but I will be pissed if I loose it.
(3) An NTFS partition using the rest of the drive. This partition is not backed up, and contains replaceable files, either files I don't care about if they are lost, or files easily re-downloaded.

When next I redo this disk, the fat32 partition at the beginning will probably be abandoned. There are a great many bootable live cd's with native ntfs support, so it really isn't necessary to have recovery tools in a bootable fat32 partition anymore. Most likely, my next disk will look like:

C: My main OS. XP64 or Vista64. TBD. (60-100GB)
D: Secondary Windows OS. TBS (20-30GB)
E: Undecided. 15-20GB. Could be 32-bit XP for compatibility reasons (unlikely, will probably VM that shit), or more likely to be whatever linux distro I get interested in at the moment.
 
SmokeRngs said:
Interesting. How do you use the hard drives since they require at least one partition to be usable? Are you using a live CD or something similar and just have the hard drives hooked up not doing anything? :p:rolleyes:

Click to expand...

hey don't make me take u to court :p

 
I keep have a 250GB WD drive for my OS. I keep everything else on a server:

2x WD 2500YS RAID 1 : Music
3x WD 2500SD RAID 5 : VM Storage
2x WD 2500SD RAID 0 : Temp Storage
1x WD 2500SD RAID 0 (it's an LSI thing) : Storage
1x Seagate 250GB : Storage (Docs, Pics, SOftware)
1x Seagate 320GB : Storage
1x WD Raptor 74GB : OS
**have to stop and look at my server now to see what else is there...**
1x WD 2500SD : Storage

I'm actually going to move some things around and create another RAID 5 array.
 
I stay far away from partitions...

I use an 80 drive for the OS and install programs. Right now, its Vista and Ubuntu.
I have a 250 gig for sorting my downloads and games.
My 500 gig is for storage.

I keep a minimum of 2 drives and it has served me well over the years when it came time to format. There is much less worry and headache when you aren't dealing with partitions.
 
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