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Rules for partitioning large capacity HDDs?

E

Elledan

[H]ard|DCer of the Month - April 2010
Joined
Oct 18, 2001
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Okay, I realize that everyone has his or her own opinion on this topic, but I'd like to ask this question regarding partitioning and large capacity (200+ GB) HDDs:

Would partitioning a HDD make sense if it's done to reduce the impact of filesystem corruption? What other sensible reasons are there for partitioning a HDD?

Right now I use partitions to separate the OS, applications and data, which makes sense in my eyes, and apparently those of others :) but when it comes to partitioning data storage HDDs I'm not so certain as to what the correct strategy is.

Any thoughts?
 
Partitioning is, as far as i am concerned a thing of the past. It's much more secure (and conveniant) to have mutiple harddrives for the same propose. Take the application partition: If you have a problem with the os partition, you'll reinstall windows. Are the applications still there on the other partition? Sure. Do they work? No way! You have to reinstall them anyways.

A Data partition? Makes sense. IF it is only data or storage. Would i partition a drive for it? No way! Why? Because if the os partition is corrupt, then fine, you kept your data. BUT if the harddrive itself is corrupt, you lose ALL partitions, regardless if OS, data or whatnot. Solution? 2 Harddrives, one for OS and applications, one for storage and data.

The prices for harddrives are terribly low these days and for $40 you get a 80GB harddrive just for storage and data. In case your first harddrive dies, your data is still healthy on the second hdd. Another benefit is that you can add harddrives to your computer without problems. Try adding partitions, changing partitions, moving them etc. It's a big iant pain in the butt, even with the best tools, since it takes a long time and there still is risk of data loss.

My 2 cents on the partition topic. You gain no speed, no data security, no nothing at all with partitioning. With 2 or more harddrives on the other hand, you have speed increase (put windows virtual mem on 2nd hdd), data security and more space in first place.
 
ScYcS said:
Partitioning is, as far as i am concerned a thing of the past. It's much more secure (and conveniant) to have mutiple harddrives for the same propose. Take the application partition: If you have a problem with the os partition, you'll reinstall windows. Are the applications still there on the other partition? Sure. Do they work? No way! You have to reinstall them anyways.
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Actually most of the applications I use (Winamp, Winrar, OpenOffice, eMule, various editors and IDEs, etc.) still work fine after an OS reinstall, or require a two-second repair operation. I like how this way I don't lose all of the settings and other data of those applications.

I've used both configurations over the years, and I must say that I prefer the partitioned approach.

My 2 cents on the partition topic. You gain no speed, no data security, no nothing at all with partitioning. With 2 or more harddrives on the other hand, you have speed increase (put windows virtual mem on 2nd hdd), data security and more space in first place.
Click to expand...
I already use separate HDDs for OS and data, so you don't need to convince me to do so :p

I think you missed the point of the question, which was whether it makes sense to partition a storage HDD :)
 
Sorry if i misunderstood....even though i still can't find the section in your post that you refer to storage only hdds [nevermind, saw it now. my bad]......

But even there it doesn't make much sense to me...
 
I don't bother to partition large drives. I just use folders to organize everything.

I defrag once a month and they really arent ever fragmented much to begin with.
 
Newer filesystems like SGI's XFS are segmented into multiple chunks. An xfs filesystem is broken into chunks, called "allocation groups". 8 are used unless the filesystem is larger than 8gb (not sure why it's phrased like this - most volumes are larger than 8gb these days). This was done for scalability (you can get multiple GB/s off a multi-tb system this way, according to SGI) but it also helps defend against corruption. The largest an AG can be is 4gb, so even if a MFT gets blown away, the most that can be lost is 4gb. It's an awesome filesystem, and highly recommended. Reiserfs for the root fs, and then xfs for storage.

Links:
mkfs.xfs manual page
SGI's xfs page
Linux FS benchmarks

 
Unfortunately I'm still stuck with the wannabe professional FS called NTFS ;)

I realize that filesystem corruption doesn't happen that often (even with NTFS), and I will be making backups regardless, but partitioning just seems like an ideal, and easy, solution to guard against such an unlikely event that it's hard not to use it.

Biggest disadvantage for daily use I've noticed is copying from partition to partition. Folder-to-folder on the same partition is nearly instantly for obvious reasons.
 
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