Advantages/Disadvantages of Partitioning

What are your views on hard drive partitioning?

Doesn't it limit the amount of software you can install on your main (Windows) partition since it is recommended that you install software only on this partition because of software complications?

 

I thought partitioning would be great for me. So I put three of them on my laptop. BIG MISTAKE! Some programs don't run right if they are not on the windows partition. When I tried to combine them they got scr*wed up. Had to reinstall XP. Not fun.
Tim

 

Partitioning is NOT evil in any way.
It IS necessary and useful if you have a hard drive larger than 20gb.

The main partition where your windows installation is, must be
around 20gigs unless you install zillions of programs.
An average PC with windows xp+office+upgrades+10 other software
needs around 5gig max. Make it 10gigs if you are a software maniac.
The remaining 10 gigs needs to be empty for defragmentation purposes.

Put your swap file on another partition (another disk if possible), and
install your games, photos, movies etc on other partitions as well.
Stuff like games and multimedia require very large spaces and
cause a lot of fragmentation which incredibly slows the system in time.
If you place these things into the same partition with your system,
the you will soon suffer from it. Keep them in another partition and
your system partition will be clean most of the time.

The only and negligeble disadvantage to partitioning is that copying
inside a partition is lightning fast, while copying between partitions is
a bit slow.

The problems you had with those programs are either because you weren't
careful when installing them and made some bad choices, or the software
you are using are terribly written and doesn't give you the flexibility to
install somewhere else. In any case, you don't have to install usual programs
into different partitions. They may live happily in the system partition.
What kills the system are stuff like games and multimedia.

 

partitioning is not necessary, it's mainly useful to keep things organized.

as for keeping 10 out of 20gb free for partitioning; that's not neces-
sary either and would just mean you are not allowing yourself to use
part of the harddisk you payed for.

defragging will take longer with a fuller disk, but is not necessarily im-
possible, unless you filled 99% of your drive, leaving insufficient space
to move around your files.

however, i agree that partitioning will not break anything, unless you
use a program such as partition magic to create new partitions or
merge existing ones, causing locations of installed programs to change,
while not running the included tool (only in the case of partition magic
that i know of) to fix those associations/links afterwards.

using a separate partition with the size of your swap file, containing
only that swapfile (min and max sizes equal) does give a marginal per-
formance increase, but that's marginal nowadays as well, as systems
have enough ram, preventing excessing swapping.

and if you are thinking of safety, consider using a physically separate
drive instead of a separate partition - partition tables can be mang-
led beyond repair and if your hardware malfunctions, that malfunction
won't care that your important data is on a separate partition anyway.

in short: to each their own =] if you want to partition, feel free to do
so. and if you don't want to, there's no huge drawback to that either.

hm. an unusual stating-opinion-as-fact post for me, but i felt like it.