Partition advice for new drive that will be for OS

[Headbust]

Hey guys, im dumping my raptor 74g 16mb in favor of the wd640, Anyway i want to switch things up possibly and do something i never have, and that is install programs onto a different partition than the OS is on(same drive though)

Is there really any benefit to this?

 

[Kelvarr]

I have often wondered about this. I don't think there is any advantage due to the fact that if the OS dies, then you still have to reinstall your games/programs even if they are on a different disk/partition.

 

[CoachB]

I believe you can repair/reinstall your OS without disturbing games/programs IF you have kept things on separate partitions. Of course any updates you might have made to the OS will probably be lost but you should be able to get the basic OS back.
I'm sure others will come along that can give you more info on this.

 

[Headbust]

I believe you can repair/reinstall your OS without disturbing games/programs IF you have kept things on separate partitions. Of course any updates you might have made to the OS will probably be lost but you should be able to get the basic OS back.
I'm sure others will come along that can give you more info on this.

yes but when you install programs they also go into the registry correct? So if you reinstall windows none of those programs will be in the registry.

Actually now that i think of it i did do this a few years back, and i remember after having to reinstall windows none of the programs worked on that seperate partition from the previous install.

None of this really bothers me though, what im curious about is whether or not there are any speed advantages by doing this

 

[nick8571]

None of this really bothers me though, what im curious about is whether or not there are any speed advantages by doing this

There's no performance advantage to having a separate partition for programs on the same physical drive - if anything, you'll slow things down by forcing the heads to do longer seeks as they have to hunt from one partition to the other. As you say, you'd have to reinstall most of your apps anyway in the event of an OS reinstall - yes, some might still run OK, but many more would be completely broken and unusable.

Some people think that short-stroking (create a single OS/apps partition just big enough for your needs and ignore the rest of the drive's capacity) might speed things up, by ensuring that the heads never stray from the outermost/fastest sectors of the drive, but I doubt if it would be anything very noticeable in normal use, especially with a big and fast drive like that WD.

If you're also going to store user data on the same drive, that's a different matter, and keeping it on a different partition makes life much simpler when you do need to format/reinstall.

 

[Headbust]

There's no performance advantage to having a separate partition for programs on the same physical drive - if anything, you'll slow things down by forcing the heads to do longer seeks as they have to hunt from one partition to the other. As you say, you'd have to reinstall most of your apps anyway in the event of an OS reinstall - yes, some might still run OK, but many more would be completely broken and unusable.

Some people think that short-stroking (create a single OS/apps partition just big enough for your needs and ignore the rest of the drive's capacity) might speed things up, by ensuring that the heads never stray from the outermost/fastest sectors of the drive, but I doubt if it would be anything very noticeable in normal use, especially with a big and fast drive like that WD.

If you're also going to store user data on the same drive, that's a different matter, and keeping it on a different partition makes life much simpler when you do need to format/reinstall.

thanks, this drive will be for everything right now, im going to dump my raptor and my old wd250 8mb (actually i think i will use it to try out OSX on windows )

but the WD will be me one drive after its all said and done.