Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
HDD Partitioning advice?
So I'm actually going to get my first HDD that has 1.5 TB. What is the modern "convention" on partitioning? Do people still partition for their OS, storage, games, etc? This is a SATA-II drive, not SATA-III, so any advice would be appreciated. Heck, is there even a need to partition a SATA HDD?
Thanks in advance.
Comments
Ive always felt that theres no need to partition a drive for your OS except for software management and just orginization. Its also nice to have this partition in case your windows install needs to be wiped so you can wipe the partition.
You're not going to get any performance gains if thats what you're after. However, if you're asking what the typical boot/OS partition is its 80 gig.
Actually I that's pretty much what I'm getting at. I haven't partitioned a drive in forever due to feeling there was no need. However, I do like to do clean installs of windows periodically and figured this might be a time I might consider partitioning. Is 80 GB sufficient for Win7 HomePro 64 bit?
I'm running Win7 64bit on a 40GB SSD drive (C:), with a 500GB SATA drive (D:) for everything else. I did move my User folders to the
drive, to keep the C: drive less cluttered and make it easier to back up the user data. Currently running with 8.71GB free space on the C: drive.
Also, I always install software to either a /Games or /Utility folder, if I get the option, rather than the default locations most software wants to use. That saves space on the system drive, since the the usual default is C:Program Files.
Hope that helps in some way.
I'd suggest at least a 60GB primary partition with other partitions as you see fit for your way of doing things. Nowadays with 500GB+ drives saving a few GB doesn't matter as much as it used to.
Having 2 or more partitions allows you to format and reinstall your operating system without having to re-install all other applications to the newly formatted partition. Many applications don't rely on having to be reinstalled when you redo the OS but there are no guarantees they will work perfectly.
Most games should work fine without reinstalling them as long as you reinstall the correct versions of DirectX and .net libraries and redistributables. Although some games like LOTRO, DDO and Entropia Universe will insist on reinstalling their versions.
60GB gives you plenty of room if you put the virtual memory on the OS partition and to grow if you eventually add Win 8.
Don't use a Solid State drive for any partition that will have the virtual memory(page) file on it unless you're willing to replace that drive every few months.
I agree - no real reason to unless you just absolutely want to, or unless your running older file systems for compatibility and need to. I've usually found it tends to degrade performance, as I try to treat the partitions as separate drives when copying and moving files. And as far as organization goes, I end up doing nearly the exact same thing with just plain old directories.
Hey, thanks for all the advice guys!
I might play around with a 60-80 GB partition to run Win7 on, but will have to see what comes in. Mostly, I am concerned that I am going to hate Win7 and want to go back to XP. I'd like to have that partitioned so I don't have to go through the whole HDD to install XP or even Linux or something later.
I had an 80GB partition for Win 7 until I upgraded to an SSD. I used about 40GB-50GB of it so 80GB felt perfect.
There is still a performance advantage to partitioning your drive. The outer edge of the platter is the fastest to retrieve data from. It's moving faster than the inner track of the hard drive so more data passes under the head in a given time. By restricting your primary partition to this section anything you put in that partition will be in that faster track and get improved data throughput.
It also improves seek time because the most commonly accessed (OS and your favorite apps) will all be in that narrow band around the outer edge, which means the head has very little distance to travel as it bounces around in that partition without having to pop in to the inner track for some other data.
Now it's not really a *big* difference and nothing like owning an SSD, but I still would do it for the ease of reformatting if nothing else. If you only play one or two games you can use that primary partition as your 'fast' partition and install your preferred MMO to it and everything else to your secondary partition.
Also, you will not hate Win7. Win 7 is so much better than WinXP. WinXP is a 10 year old OS now..
Thank you noquarter you confirmed my thoughts on the partition. As far as Win7, I will probably agree, I've just always loved my XP...
11.10.26
with sata2 (Serial ATA) two TB hd retailing for ~$80 and three TB ~$150 not really sure you are set on a single 1.5TB?
Many mobo (motherboard) allow for three to six hd (hard drive) connections usually mostly sata2 (3Gb/s) and maybe a single sata3 (6Gb/s) connection, you might consider the ssd (solid State Drive) as the drive for the OS (Operating System) considering the ssd (60-120GB, ~$80 to $250) fast read/write capability, e.g. computer boots up in 7 to 14 sec, and use additional 2 or 3TB hds for data storage. HD benchmarks
The good thing about putting data on separate hd is the less risk if something seriously goes wrong with the latest beta one is testing and it corrupts that hd. As long as one has proper backups on a third or fourth hd it is no big deal to simply wipe that corrupted hd and start over (understanding one does not risk the OS primary hd to beta test junk)... in contrast if one has everything on a single 1.5TB hd that gets corrupted, getting the OS back up to date will be a chore not to mention loss of registry values of the many supplemental programs installed; not to mention the need to again download the many GB of programs, with most modern ISP (Internet Service Provider) forcing monthly data caps.
An advantage of partitioning the multi TB hd is it really speeds up defraging (do not have to defrag ssd) or wiping with 3 to 15x (better yet removable hd [for sensitive data] to lessen nsa opportunity to snoop through W7 & W8's backdoors). You would be shocked the time it takes antimalware programs to go through a couple 3TB hd!
1 partition will do you just fine.