partitioning help

[Krayzie135]

im thinking of getting a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB SATA 7200RPM 16MB and i dont know anything about HDs. so how would be a good way to partition it for games and LOTS of music, pics and movies. or should i get 2 smaller drives?

 

[Lord_Vyper]

1 partition. There, done.

 

[Nivram]

Yeah, okay......Lord Vader goes the simplistic way. Okay, if you want to wait a week every time you want to defrag that drive!

Now let's go visit reality-land.....

Maxtor, like all the other hard drive manufacturers, includes a cd-rom disk in with their retail hard drives. Theirs has a program on it called Maxblast, that can be run either during startup, or while you're in windows (just install it and run it).

Maxblast will help you to partition the hard drive to whichever size(s) you want, and will also format the partition(s) for you. Just take your time, and remember that if you screw it up the first time, you can do it again....and again, and again, and again, until you get it the way you want it.

I generally keep my partitions fairly small, basically no larger than ~30 to 40 gb in size (depends on the size of the drive). That way, when you're doing a defrag on that partition, you're not waiting forever for it to be done. You don't mention if you're adding this as a second (third, etc) drive, or if this will be your primary master drive, with your operating system on it. If it's got the OS on it, I'd go ~40gb for the first partition, then make whatever size you're comfortable with for the remainder. Remember that windows will support up to 26 drives without any trouble (I've never had to use more than that, even on my terabyte tower file server), but unless you really know what you're doing, you're going to lose A & B for floppies, and likely at least one (or more) letters for your optical drives.

You're also going to lose some storage capacity to the formatting of the drive partition(s), so don't be surprised if you end up with ~280gb (maybe less.....don't know) out of a 300gb hard drive. It's a fact of life, and impossible to get around. So if you make your operating system partition ~40gb, and then make the remainder of the partitions ~20gb, you'll end up with (a lucky number) 13 partitions on your drive. Your computer will assign drive letter automatically, tho you can change them if you need to. If you're going to have a drive that large, I'd also make certain I had a dvd burner handy, to backup the data you don't want to lose. Cuz let's face it, hard drives don't last forever, do they?

Okay, hope that helps, and doesn't leave you with more questions than you started out with.

 

[Krayzie135]

this is for a brand new rig im building so it will be my main drive, so i should put my OS on 1 partition, games on another and music too? how much HD space does win xp take?

 

[RavenD]

You definitely want your media storage on a partition separate from the OS, so that when you reformat/reinstall windows, you dont lose the media. A separate partition for applications and games doesnt make as much difference, because when you reformat, you'll need to reinstall most applications anyway. If you go the route of a partition for windows, and a second one for everything else, or two more, one for apps, one for media, 6GB should be plenty for windows. I have windows on a 6.64GB partition, with 2.91 free, with a 750mb pagefile.

 

[Lord_Vyper]

Yeah, okay......Lord Vader goes the simplistic way. Okay, if you want to wait a week every time you want to defrag that drive!

Diskeeper is your friend

Aside from that, if you want better performance, have 1 smallish physical drive as you windows boot drive (SATA slot 1) and a giant drive as the storage drive.
Have the boot drive as 1 partition, and make multiple partitions on the giant storage drive to reflect general categories of stuff you want to store there. Like, if you have a 200gb drive, have 100 for music, and 100 for movies. As others said, if you need to wipe windows at some future date, you can just futz with the first disk, and leave the 2nd alone (so all your stuff stays secure)

 

[Krayzie135]

thx for all the help

should i put my apps on the same drive as my os or different?

 

[Lord_Vyper]

other drive for best performance, though it's a pain to remember to install things to D:\Program Files instead of C:\Program files sometimes.

There are a few exceptions to this though. If you use Photoshop heavily, you'd want that on C, and the scratch on D.

 

[st4rk]

With one physical drive at 300gb I would do this:

Partition 1 : 20gb for winxp
Partition 2: 4gb for Page file (smaller if you have less ram)
Partition 3: Games
Partition 4: Apps

 

[Xahok]

start>run> diskmgmt.msc

you can change letters of drives

 

[Astral Abyss]

If you want convenience of being able to reformat without having to backup your data to another disk, I'd say make 1 partition for the OS and one for everything else. Performance wise, you're hurting yourself by adding more than 1 partiton to a hard disk.

Adding more partitions to a disk adds more overhead and isn't really doing a whole lot for you. You're still writing to the same disk, files will still get fragmented, and your heads still have to jump around to seek the data they're looking for, moreso, in fact, when you add partitions.

I think it's kind of a pain in the ass because eventually you will be annoyed at your partition sizes since you always end up wanting more space on the partitions that you didn't make big enough. (Yeah I did the multipartition thing back in the day, and I don't now. Take that as you will)

In my experience, you want 1 partition on a disk unless you absolutely cannot afford to add a 2nd drive and still want the convenience of reformatting your OS partition without losing the rest of your data, or you're using a RAID5 hardware array and want seperate partitions for OS, page file, and data (usually on a server).

If you're just doing it to seperate data types, that's pointless. That's what folders are for.

Just because it's a big drive doesn't mean you need multiple partitions.

 

[Krayzie135]

ive seen the light lol

i guess 1 partition is good enough and if i need more space i can always buy more GB which ill probly end up doing knowing me. i have 120gb on current comp and its 94% full in 2 weeks(mostly songs )