Does dividing a 500gb hard drive into two partitions boost access speed?

I just bought a new laptop and it has 5 partitions! Two partitions for storage (one 500gb) and the other hard drive has the OS in it's own little portion along with another for data and of course, the restore.

I vaguely recall hearing that partitioning 1tb-2tb hard drives makes access times a little faster but was wondering if it would have any major benefits for a 500 gb hard drive.

Thanks for your hep guys.

 

having multiple partitions on a single hard drive regardless of size can in theory slow down a drive. your OS will happily see the multiple partitions as multiple 'hard drives' and attempt multiple accesses. with a single hardware device to service those multiple access requests, things get queued up beyond what the stock OS drivers can handle. so the i/o queue gets longer and longer.

this is more of an issue with the server os variants but since the desktop os come from that code and driver core, it can still be a problem.

when people see/claim speedups by partitioning hard drives this is the result of their reducing the size of the filesystem (ntfs, ext3/4, zfs, etc) tables that the os needs to manage. smaller filesystem tables = faster searching and indexing eventually results in faster data access and eventual transfer. but if you go ahead and actively use the rest of that physical drive space as another active partition, the os now has to manage multiple sets of filesystem tables as well as the i/o.

this is the reason why the big boys are all selling storage virtualization controllers alongside their big storage boxes and why truly intelligent pci-e and intelliband disk controllers cost so much money. the SVC appliances take care of the management of the partitions and filesystem table i/o so that the host os and system only see the exact data they think they are managing.

again, this is primarilly a server os problem. remember that the desktop os variants don't have access to any of the remediation techniques available to the servers so any i/o bottleneck problem that might arise will be magnified.

 

Very informative. Thank you.

 

The outer edges of a hard drive deliver faster transfer rates. So if you want your OS and applications to be on the fastest part of your hard drive, you have to partition. 80GB would be a good size for a primary partition.

As you can see in every HDTune benchmark, the beginning of a hard drive is the fastest:


Acces times are also better at the beginning of the drive: