partition question

[blarf]

hey,
i just bought myself a new HD (wd 640gb 32mo). now, thats the first HDD i buy, in like 6 years.
i want to install win 7 (64bits most likely) and my video games, and do a little storage too.

should i partition the hard drive? if yes, what should be the limit to keep some decent performances?

thanks

blard

 

[Dangman]

Reserve the first 20% to 25% of the total hard drive space for the OS/Apps partition. Leave the rest of the hard drive space as the data partition.

 

[EnderW]

Reserve the first 20% to 25% of the total hard drive space for the OS/Apps partition. Leave the rest of the hard drive space as the data partition.

yeah this is good advice if you want to squeeze every bit of performance out of the drive, but I doubt you'd notice a difference
it's also nice if you break windows and need to do a reinstall, you can just format the windows partition and leave the storage partition intact
I used to do this on computers I setup for people, but you have to remember to map all the user folders (my documents, desktop, etc) to the second partition or you will run out of room quickly

 

[InvisiBill]

HD Tune's graph can give you an idea of how fast the different parts of your drive are.

The outer edges of the disk have a larger circumference, and thus 1 revolution at the outside edge holds more data than 1 revolution at the inside edge. However, short-stroking your drive also keeps the data limited to a certain physical part of the drive, meaning it spends less time moving the read/write head all over the disk.