partition affects performance ?

[latief75]

i read somewhere that partitioning the harddrive (into two 40gbs instead of 1 80gb partition for example ) could affect the performance ?? is this true ? or is it just a myth...?

 

[perplex]

years ago i heard that partitioning the hard disk into chunks will speed up performance. i dont know for sure though

 

[Herulach]

You might save a bit of space by reducing the cluster size, and you could theoretically improve performance by making everything on one partition be at the start of the disk, but not hugely i dont think.

 

[Ice Czar]

it can be true depending

the idea is to limit the number of degrees the armeture is travelling
reducing the average seek


http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=925422&page=2

by placing files you rarely access in a seperate partition they arent going to get in the way of the OSs "normal operation" thus when the OS does need to look at a given file part of it isnt going to be near the edge and the rest near the spindle (Inner Diameter \ ID)

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=741512

the possibilities get even better with multiple HDDs where you can employ the higher sustained transfer and lower seek latencies of the outer diameter (OD) of multiple disks for highly accessed files and relegate the slower interior space for storage.

but its all usage driven
when a single HDD is asked to access data that is now in both the performance space near the OD and data in the ID the arm will have to traverse likely a greater distance \ more degrees of arc
so knowing your access pattern can be important, some data can just be read once and loaded into memory (and subsequently the pagefile) and rarely accessed again while your using it, but if the arm is constantly popping back and forth for a given access pattern you maybe taking a perfomance hit over a single partition

thats why partitioning is such a personal thing

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Diskmon.html (freeware)
and
start > run > perfmon.msc > help
enables you to add counters for almost everything on your system logical \ physical disk, processor, memory, paging file, but it wont tell you what is accessed in the disk which is why I linked diskmon

 

[latief75]

i'm not a harddrive expert ....

but wouldn't it be affected by the number of platters inside the harddrive ???

i just bought an 80gb for my laptop(hitachi 5k100, awsome by the way ..i barely hear it ) .....

i partitioned it into 2 40gbs

i'm trying to see if i should recongifure it into 1 partition for performance reasons ....

i always split harddrives to get one for backup and one for windows ... just incase i need to install it again .....

 

[Ice Czar]

Hard Disk Tracks, Cylinders and Sectors

The Difference Between Tracks and Cylinders

A hard disk is usually made up of multiple platters, each of which use two heads to record and read data, one for the top of the platter and one for the bottom (this isn't always the case, but usually is; see here for more details). The heads that access the platters are locked together on an assembly of head arms. This means that all the heads move in and out together, so each head is always physically located at the same track number. It is not possible to have one head at track 0 and another at track 1,000.

Because of this arrangement, often the track location of the heads is not referred to as a track number but rather as a cylinder number. A cylinder is basically the set of all tracks that all the heads are currently located at. So if a disk had four platters, it would (normally) have eight heads, and cylinder number 720 (for example) would be made up of the set of eight tracks, one per platter surface, at track number 720. The name comes from the fact that if you mentally visualize these tracks, they form a skeletal cylinder because they are equal-sized circles stacked one on top of the other in space.

in short you can ignore the 3rd dimension when thinking about partitionong since the heads are all in lockstep with each other
its all about ZBR
and what that means for both sustained transfer and seek latencies
http://www.lostcircuits.com/hdd/hdd2/
http://www.lostcircuits.com/hdd/hdd3/

 

[Ice Czar]

i always split harddrives to get one for backup and one for windows ... just incase i need to install it again .....

well if they are Mirrored (RAID 1) thats one thing
but if they are manually imaged or backed up manually, employing their performance space seperately offers advantages, backups are an ideal rarely accessed storage candidate for interior ID space, its a little more complicated than a whole drive clone and you do need to factor in partition sizes to make it work.

 

[DougLite]

Also, going by cylinders rather than from one platter to the next in a fall-over fashion when conducting a linear operation on the disk means that the fastest parts of the disk (the outside of the platters) are all together, and the transfer rate decays roughly linearly as the heads work inwards.

It would also be ridiculously expensive and complex to design an actuator that could move the read/write head for each recording surface independently. It wouldn't be very reliable either, as you would dramatically increase the number of moving parts.