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That is incorrect, sir.provoko said:
Assuming you mean separate partitions on the same disk: No. I will explain.provoko said:
I don't think hard drives work that way... you don't fill up the platters sequentially, you fill up a certain region on the first platter (corresponding to a particular cylinder adress), then the same cylinder address on the second platter, and so on.WickedWeasel said:
One way or another you're going to have your OS and your games in different locations on the disk, and the head is going to travel back and forth between them. How much of this movement is unneccesary depends only on how much free space there is on the partitons. If you keep your OS partition as small as possible (5GB seems to do me just fine), and have your games at the start of the next partition, the difference will be insignificant.GreNME said:
Seems to me the best setup is having your OS, your page file, and your apps/games on separate drives if you want to minimise seek times. Even if you've got 2GB of RAM and shouldn't even be using the page file, Windows still seems to do so...provoko said:
No, because the platters are stacked directly above each other, as are the read-write heads. Each read-write head does not move independently of the head on another platter. They all move at exactly the same time because they are all on the same mechanical arm. What I displayed applies equally no matter how many platters are on the drive.WickedWeasel said:
That would almost be a good argument, except I am willing to bet you have no way of being able to place a partition on a single platter. In fact, I would love to see someone find a way to do that and prove what they did.WickedWeasel said:
You should get one drive for the OS and programs, and a separate drive for your My Docs. If you want to get really tweaked, you could get yourself a third drive and have the paging file on the first partition (and, if you want, archival storage on the rest).WickedWeasel said:
It depends on the model drive you get, but on the whole they are supposed to be faster.WickedWeasel said:
The OS and programs, yes.WickedWeasel said:
No, they wouldn't be resolved. Some performance issues might be lessened, and only under the right circumstances, but no software can fix the problem of improperly laid out hardware.WickedWeasel said:
The same thing, only it takes just slightly longer. It will still fragment quickly and wear out your drive faster (which isn't important to dudes who swap hardware every six months, but I prefer counting lifetimes in years).provoko said:
Not as insignificant as you might think. All of those different partitions need to be referenced by the OS core components, and even if you turn indexing off (which isn't a bad idea when under 80GB) you are still going to increase disk thrashing by putting the programs on a separate partition like that. In the end, using the configuration you claim, there isn't even an advantage to having them split up. Even the built-in defragmenter in Windows attempts to put files that are used most often in close proximity to one another, and forcing them to be that far apart on the disk just leaves a constant gap in the disk between the OS and the programs-- even if the core OS and most common programs were on the first blocks of their reaspective partitions, there would be nearly five GB of platter space between them that the heads would have to traverse on a regular basis.LuminaryJanitor said:
That is based on theoretical nonsense. If you want to minimize seek times, keep your disk clean of temp internet files, temp installation files, and regularly clean out your prefetch. Then defrag so that the most used files are mostly stacked together. Windows XP can even do those things for you automagically: automate disk cleanup and automate defrag. Set each of those to run weekly.LuminaryJanitor said:
So does Linux, and so does BSD, and so does OS X. The reason it still pages is because virtual memory is critical to the stability of operations for the OS. That is why it can "multitask" so well. Otherwise, if you were flying along on your OS and some system file was stored in a location in RAM that had a bad block (and all volatile memory eventually gets bad blocks), your whole OS would crash hard. OS 9 and Windows 98 were good examples of running without good virtual memory.LuminaryJanitor said:
GreNME said:
LuminaryJanitor said:
...?GreNME said:
You misquoted me. I said having one drive for OS and programs and a second for My Docs is the optimal way to go, with a third containing a paging partition at the beginning of the disk if you want to be extra 'l33t' about it (I have never seen real-world numbers showing it helps). In every drive configuration I suggest, the OS and Programs are together. I acknowledge and realize that other people suggest otherwise, but I recommend against it on single-user environments because there is no real-world advantages, no one has ever proven the claims that there are, and the risk to wear and tear on the drives is often increased in the configurations people use.LuminaryJanitor said:
It doesn't work like that. If you run any kind of defrag program, even the built-in one, programs are going to be moved to the earlier sectors on their partition, and you can't really move things around so that programs and files you want on the physical disk (the OS doesn't see things that way).WickedWeasel said:
Yes, I figured this is both the reason for wanting to do it and the hopes for how doing things that way will work out. However, I can guarantee you that you will find that setup will not work for you the way you want. The second you reinstall from the ghost image and try to run any program, things are going to be decisively wrong and not work correctly. However, the thinking you are trying to apply to a single-user environment of Windows has three major flaws:WickedWeasel said:
GreNME said:
provoko said:
Basically, what I am saying is that placing programs and the OS on separate partitions crates OS and hardware overhead in that the OS is what determines which processes are run with which priorities, and the hardware has to keep moving between the two drives. Whether different physical or logical drives doesn't make a difference to Windows, because either way it is still logical drives to the OS. I am saying that you are offering no benefit in a single-user environment, even though a multi-user environment uses this method to minimize the server overhead when a number of users are accessing data or an application on that server at any given time.provoko said:
No, defrag doesn't move them to "early" sectors, it places them in sectors relatively close to one another (within reason and the constraints of the software / file sizes). Defrag cannot move files between partitions, it can only move them inside of a single partition, hence my suggestion keeping the OS and program files in the same partition.provoko said:
Even if you have no visible page file, Windows still pages. In other words, Windows always pages some number of files or processes. There is no way to avoid it (and if you found a way, you would break the OS).provoko said:
Nope, you're missing a whole lot of steps that are unseen and pretty much supposed to be invisible to the end-user of a given operating system.provoko said:
Nope, as I said, all Windows is concerned with are the logical drives. If all of the programs and OS files are on the same logical drive, then that is less that the OS has to keep track of as it does all of the steps I outlined above (and many more). If you split these among multiple drives, all you are accomplishing is having to spin up those other drives more often, putting more mechanical work into the processes that make up normal operations. You would be making the process more complex with the only end result (as far as the OS is concerned) being that the files are laid out in a more complex pattern. This doesn't necessarily mean lower performance, but it certainly does not mean better performance and there has never been a reasonable, repeatable example of it ever showing a noticable increase in performance.provoko said:
No, different partitions on the same disk results in more back-and-forth than even having the partitions on separate disks. It is just that in both scenarios, the OS is unaware (remember: it only sees them as logical drives). A disk with the head moving constantly across the platters also offers no benefits, and adds the extra risk of a hardware failure occurring sooner.provoko said:
I hope all of this helps at least a little. In the end, like I pointed out, you can go with whatever advice you want. It's your system. I am just one of the people who prefers to dispel the myth of creating unnecessarily complex configurations for achieving performance, and my experience is based not only on hardware or software experience, but from studying how the software and hardware work together, communicate with each other, and why software is written the way it is today in different types of environments. The most popular "tweaks" I've seen out there for Windows involve single-user environments trying to treat the configuration like a multi-user environment in the hopes of achieving some theoretical performance gain, and this never seems to be based in solid theory. There is always some assumption made about how the hardware or software will react to these tweaked scenarios that is completely foreign to how the software (and hardware) works and was designed to work.provoko said:
Hehe.Actually, I am pretty sure I said earlier that having one disk be used for OS and programs, while the second disk be for your My Docs was the best way to go. Which disk you use for which is entirely up to you. I would assume you want the larger volume to be used for files, while the (relatively) smaller one be used for OS and programs.
No, I'm saying it all comes down to simplicity and how the OS works. Convenience only matters in how convenient it is for the OS to operate, and I already pointed out there are no known performance benefits. I have said repeatedly that performance doesn't even realistically factor in.
I never said it will equal more performance. I said that running with a more complex disk structure will not offer a performance benefit.