Key to setting up partitions

[burningrave101]

Do any of you have any special ways you've found best for setting up partitions? I usually just do it in the windows CD setup thing when i'm installing windows xp. I'm in the process of downloading PartitionMagic 8 now though because i want to resize the partitions i have.

Is there any ratio or equation you can use to make your partitions come out near perfect? I format everything in NTFS and the reason i'm asking is like a 250GB drive isn't really a 250GB drive after its formatted. Its more like 230-240GB. And then when i make like 40GB and 120GB partitions they are just 39GB and 117GB after formatting. I realize this isn't a big deal but i thought some of you might have it all figured out how to set up nearly exact 40GB, 80GB, 120GB and so on size partitions after format. How much room does NTFS formatting take up per GB, is there an exact amount or does it vary?

I'm trying to partition up this WD 250GB drive for storage and i want to get it as perfect as possible.

Is there any other in-windows partitioning tools for resizing the OS partition besides PM?

I was thinking like a 120GB partition for Games, 40GB for Multimedia, 80GB for application storage, and then leave the rest for backing up data like My Documents. I intend to ither buy 1 74GB or 2 36GB raptors for RAID0 in the next few weeks and that will be what my OS is installed on along with my install directory for applications.

 

[Snugglebear]

Each drive's usable space comes out differently after it's partitioned and formatted. You'll find a few more MBs here and less there accross manufacturers and product lines. There's really no way of knowing how much that cost is other than estimating about 10-15% will be consumed due to the base-10 base-2 difference and filesystem overhead.

However, if you want software to give you a nice, round number, use multiples of 2. Remember that a MB is 2^20, a GB 2^30. Given that you'll probably be feeding a parititioning tool MBs, 8 GB = 8 *1024 = 8192MB. Even then a few MB will probably be lopped off for various reasons, but don't worry about it.

For example, my 18GB IBM 36Z15 winds up having 17500MB of usable space at partition time. Normally, for a Win32 workstation config, that works out to be two partitions, 6GB (6144MB) for system/apps, remainder for data. That other ~11GB shows in Windows as ~10.9GB, the 6GB rounds off even.