Partitioning a velociraptor?

[SkyMonkey]

I am putting together an i7 build, and just got a 300gb velociraptor for the main disk. Motherboard is the gigabyte ud3r. I'll be installing vista64 (home premium), and my use of the system is mainly gaming (WoW, TF2, and newer games), and daily web/email use. Fast performance in OS and fast performance in games (loads etc) are both desired equally. I won't be going SSD at this time.

Should I partition the velociraptor into a 50gb os partition and 250gb games/apps partition?

Last system I built (with a 10k raptor several years ago), this is what I did, as it was recommended at the time. I've since read that partitioning a fast drive like the velociraptor can hurt performance...on the other hand I can make the cluster sizes on the larger games/apps partition a bit larger (was thinking 32K) which I know boosts read speeds.

Where should the page file(s) go? On my current system there is pagefile on both the large partition of the boot drive (10k raptor), and another on a 200gb 7200rpm WD drive.

Other drives in the new system will be an existing 80gb raid1 made of 2 80gb 7200.7 seagates (on the gigabyte controller, no need for speed, this data is rarely accessed) for my vital data (also backed up off site), and the 200gb 7200rpm WD above, which will share the ICH10R with the velociraptor and a SATA cd/dvdrw. The old 10k raptor will stay in the other system. The velociraptor will be the only fast drive.

 

[Menelmarar]

I put games/OS/App installs all on one drive/partition. If you lose the OS, your likely to have to reinstall most other apps/games anyway. Sounds like a waste of time and headache.

Then a storage drive for all other files, media, documents, that would need to persist through a reformat.

 

[InvisiBill]

Partitioning the drive inherently splits it. If you're trying to access stuff in both partitions, it'll have to jump back and forth between the different sections of the drive. If you've got a 50GB partition with 45GB of data on, the rest of the data would still be out almost as far on the drive, so there won't be much difference. However, if you've got two equal 150GB partitions and the first one only has 50GB of data on it, then every access to the second partition has to jump over that empty 100GB space.

If you use multiple pagefiles, put them on on multiple drives. Multiple partitions on the same drive will just split up accesses as described above. It may be best to put the pagefile (if you even need one) just on a second, slower drive. This way the other stuff on the main hard drive would never be competing with the pagefile for disk accesses. Assuming you've got enough RAM, it shouldn't be hitting the pagefile too often anyway, so you might not even notice the slower drive.

Personally, I use 4 partitions on my single drive. The first ones are fairly small, so I'm not needlessly pushing other data out into the slower parts of the disk, but it's much easier to organize the files.

If you make an appropriately sized first partition, I don't think the second partition will slow things down that much. If having a second partition makes it easier to work with, go for it. If you don't have any specific need for the second partition, it may be easiest to just use one big partition.

If you lose the OS, your likely to have to reinstall most other apps/games anyway. Sounds like a waste of time and headache.

Personally, I've found the exact opposite. It really depends on what programs you use though. Some installers are nothing more than prettied-up file copiers and shortcut creators. Others seem to want to bind into the deepest level of the OS as many times as possible.

 

[SkyMonkey]

Personally, I've found the exact opposite. It really depends on what programs you use though. Some installers are nothing more than prettied-up file copiers and shortcut creators. Others seem to want to bind into the deepest level of the OS as many times as possible.

This is true for me as well. The majority of the game/app software I use is either A) Not tied to any one windows install, I can copy directories over with no issue (and gets placed away from the OS), or B) Small/light/and easy enough to install/configure that it gets installed with the OS on every build (word, utilities, etc).

Can anyone recommend me some software that will show me where physically on a drive partitions are located? Is there a convention that the first partition created starts at the inside always? I'm not up to snuff on my drive tech (I generally research this stuff only when I build something, every 2-5 years).

 

[InvisiBill]

Can anyone recommend me some software that will show me where physically on a drive partitions are located? Is there a convention that the first partition created starts at the inside always? I'm not up to snuff on my drive tech (I generally research this stuff only when I build something, every 2-5 years).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive

As of 2008, a typical 7200rpm desktop hard drive has a sustained "disk-to-buffer" data transfer rate of about 70 megabytes per second. This rate depends on the track location, so it will be highest for data on the outer tracks (where there are more data sectors) and lower toward the inner tracks (where there are fewer data sectors)

That states that the edge of the disk is faster than the hub. Since the "beginning" of a disk is fastest, I take that to mean that they start at the outside and work their way in. Partitions are created in order, so the first would be on the outside edge and the last would be at the hub.