Why is partitioning a good idea for a laptop?

The only idea I can come up with is to dual-boot...

I was actually wondering if it's a good idea to partition maybe half you rharddrive for media, and the other half for Vista. Since you have to reformat so much for vista, you can just reformat that partition without having to lose all your information, making things very easy. I'm not sure if you can actually do that though.

 

i do this! i have 60 for vista 100 for storage. it does work that way. if you reinstall windows your data is untouched. you can do it right in windows click start-> right click on computer -> click manage -> click manager on the left and you can split your drive however you want.

 

bump it bump

 

you've just answered your own question

back in the days of windows 95, you would see performance gains by keeping the operating system installed on a separate partition from your data...i've even seen 3 partitions on a machine during those times...i think you put your swap file on the 3rd one..i forget, lol..

anyways, once we got to windows 2000, i think the performance gain was very minimal, so it wasnt really worth the extra trouble anymore...

so currently, what you have already stated is probably one of the best reasons to partition the drive...

 

i see no reason to partition a notebook if a tool like acronis TI is used on a regular basis.

i simply do this. i have a 200gb HD in my laptop 1 partition. i keep my itunes folder on an external for backup, along with an image of my vista, minus my itunes (65GB)

when i want to restore, i just restore the 8gb vista backup, takes like 20 min.

then im up and running, and i just let my EXT HD copy the music over, while i do other things

 

Actually partitioning will help in reducing fragmentation to a little extent.... Also you can organize your data more easily.... All sensitive data is better to be kept on some other partition other than C: and if you need to re-install Vista or something you can easily do that by merely formatting C: and installing Vista freshly....

 

Better yet, with partitioning you could resotre a previous image of the OS partition, without restoring older versions of your data. In this way: imaging the Os partition will take up less time and resources. You can do that only after major updates or software installation.
Backing up your data will also take less time and resources, since you won't have to copy all the OS along with it, and could be done more frequently with less overhead.

Moreover, if some program overwrites your file allocation table, you only loose one partition (it usually is the OS partition the one that rots). The other partition's FAT will be far, far away.

You could live happily ever after.

 

I have 15 GB for Vista and the rest in one partition. It's useless having more partitions nowadays, since more partitions mean less speed for the last one.

 

How will partitioning reduce fragmentation? Fragmentation would be the same regardless since it is all about writing files to disk in a contiguous manner or not. If you never write files to your data partition then there wouldn't be much fragmentation occurring, but the same is true on a one partition setup. If you don't modify the files at all they won't refragment.

In terms of the thread...

I personally don't ever partition my drives. I've had too many problems with partitions back in my early days of computing (the Windows 98 & 2000 arena). I've had situations where the partition table randomly gets destroyed and as a result there goes all of your partitions and the data they contain. I find it easier, and safer, to just backup your data to an external HD and go from there. As backing up data to one drive is a bad idea anyways...

 

The thing is the data which gets frequently accessed is always the one to get fragmented..... When your files are on different partitions - the chances of ones which get accessed frequently to reside on all your drives is much lesser and not only that it gets fragmented only with the files on that partition and not the whole..... If you need to do a defrag it is much faster than defragging a single hard drive....

 

You should thank your OS for this.
Besides, backing up a partition table only requires 512 bytes. That's the dimension of the MBR that holds 446 bytes of boot code and 4*16 bytes of partition data.
If you had backed it up you could have easily have recovered your partitions.
You can back it up with pencil and paper, if you wish .

Not only that, but if something is rewriting your MBR, chanches are it will also rewrite the beginning of the disk, taking the File Allocation Table in data heaven. This means that you will lose the pointers to the files in the first partition and you would have to recover them one by one with specialized programs with no guarantees of success.

If you have a partitioned drive you loose only the FAT of the first partition (the one with the OS, whose image you have backed up after the last main update of OS and programs). The other FATs are safe in the middle of the disk and you only have to reconstruct the partition table - the above mentioned 512 byte. All your documents are there awaiting for you and, hopefully, for a better OS.

 

That is the main reason...besides dual boot