How many Partitions?

Just received a new Acer 3820T and ordered a Momentus XT 500GB drive. Wanted to do a clean install of Win 7 64bit on it (home premium).

I was curious if people recco'd partitioning the drive, and if so, how much to put on the partition that will contain the OS, and how many partitions to make to ensure performance is at a maximum?

Thanks!

 

Personally. I delete all partitions and install to the unallocated space in the advanced menu of the Windows 7 64bit installer.

There isn't really any reason to partition your drive unless you want to artificially segment your data. With really large drives (such as 1.5 TB drives), if you create 2 partitions, you can actually get improved performance on the first partition, but I've never seen this behavior on notebook hard drives.

I think if you are using an XT, I'd go with a single large partition.

Also, before you install, make sure that your BIOS has your Hard Drives set to AHCI (sometimes they say it is RAID) mode. Do not set it in IDE mode. IDE mode will nullify many of the performance advantages of the XT.

 

StormEffect is right. Honestly, the only reasons why you would want a partition are a) you want to have a Windows back up partition (not really needed if you have reinstall discs) or b) you're dual-booting with a second OS.

 

c) If you have a number of very small files that would take up excessive space using the larger cluster sizes. 32k clusters with 1000 files averaging 4k would be very wasteful.

 

I have two partitions in my drive, one for windows installation and programs; the other for music, videos, photos and games (Steam). After reading what has been said above, I'm now rethinking about partitioning my drive. The reason that I've done this is that when I want to do a fresh install of Windows (I do it every six months), I can reformat the partition with Windows without having to delete all of my stuff. I have a 1TB external hard drive as backup as well.

Please share your thoughts about this, thanks!

 

one drive has 2.

the other has 3.

 

Makes sense to me. I ended up going with 3...

 

Id go with two partitions.

How big depends on how much stuff you generally install on your OS. If you like to install a ton of games then you want a bigger OS drive.

If you make it too small you can just expand it later with some partition editing software and you wont lose your data.

The main reason to have two partitions (besides dual boot like mentioned already) is incase you really fowl up windows and have to do a clean install. You will lose all the data on the C: with the OS but if your smart you keep all your media on the other partition.

Movies, Pictures, Installers, Bookmarks, anything that is data/media and not installed. This way you can do a fresh install of windows and not lose any of that precious data.

Of course this wont protect you from a drive failure, so if its important data back it up to another drive as well.

 

1. OS+programs (120go)
2. Data (350go)
3. HP restore (12go)

 

Curious, why "if you game" would you want a largers OS drive? Wouldn't you just keep the Windows OS on the main drive and the games on the other?

(I don't game, so if that was a stupid question, be kind!!).

 

No, as I hinted about why to have 2 partitions you keep things that install on the OS drive and all stand alone files like media on the 2nd partition.

If you had to wipe your OS with a clean install and you had the games installed on the 2nd partition they would no longer work because they would not be installed and integrated with the new OS install.

Have you ever tried to just drag & drop a game install from one computer to another? Its the same concept. Things like registry entries and other minor files/changes are entered into the OS as part of the installation so there is no reason to not wipe the game along with the OS and thus why you install it on the OS partition.

 

My main has single HDD has 4, 1 OS storage partition with some extra space, 2 main data partitions and 1 important file and note partition.

The two mains i used for video encoding while i work with media,

Main A has the raw footage from cameras
Main B recieves the encoded footage with later change etc...

 

All my computers have at least 3 partitions. And I always clean up all the pre-partition that came from manufacturer.
On Windows only machine, I have
1. OS/Application partition (generally 20-40GB)
2. data partition (the rest of the spaces)
3. Swap partition. (4GB for 32bits and more if 64bits)

On Linux only machine, at the minimum.
1. /boot
2. /
3. swap

And on dual boot.
[P1 /boot] [P2 /] [P3 Windows OS] [P4(L5 DATA) (L6 SWAP Windows) (L7 SWAP linux)]
P=Primary Partition
L=Logical Partition

For me, separating OS & data serve 3 purposes
1. easy to backup, back up is just as easy as copy the whole partition.
2. partition failure, if I happened to have partition corrupted on my OS partition, my data would still be safe. This also mean, if my OS is for some reason become unbootable, BSOD or whatever. I can reformat this partition and reinstall OS w/o worrying about my data. You could theoretically save the image of the OS partition on here, if space provided and serve a similar purpose as manufacturer hidden partition but with all the applications already installed and properly configured.
3. speed, well a mere simple of optimization and defrag. OS & apps usually don't get move around, so once everything is installed, defrag once I don't very have to defrag this partition again. Cuz most of the files in this partition would just be read, and writing on this partition is not as frequent. Smaller partition for OS & apps mean, less indexing and easier to locate file, which in turn mean faster loading(not by much, but every little bit help especially after years of usage which you start to have bit rots).

The reason I separate my swap partition is almost identical to the reasons I separate my OS & data partition, but mostly to avoid frequent defrag.

 

As far as I know, the purpose of partitioning a drive is to separate system data from personal files. In older versions of OS, this set-up helps in virtual memory optimization. I agree with StormEffect. Perhaps there will be advantage in terms of organizing data, but no system performance difference will be achieved in this case.
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