Is it possible to partition an SSD after os installation?

With HDD it was possible, I am wondering if it is the same for an SSD and if any specific tool must be used

 

SSD is no different than HDD from the OS perspective.

 

Well, what about from the disk partitioners perspective?

 

It's a disk, the OS isn't going to treat it any differently than a spinning platter hard drive. Now, as to whether you can repartition a drive that already has data, that depends on a lot of factors. Just what is it you're planning on doing, and why?

 

I've seen partitioning on SSDs have strange effects on random performance. I would advice against it.

 

Personally, I would never partition my SSD.

 

Since Win7 by default partitions all HDD/SSD's (if given the chance) I don't see how it can affect performance in any way?

Partitioning is not only advisable for easier backup/restores of your data - but it also makes the system faster in my experience (when using a two or more drive setup).

Especially when using this tip to move all the user folders to your second HDD/Partition:

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/win...gramdata-folder-separate-drive-partition.html



And: especially when you create a partition (initially...) to limit the amount of space you and the O/S will use. On a HDD this ensures that the O/S is using the fastest part of the platters... On an SSD this helps with increased durability/longetivity and also with higher (sustained, overall) performance. (I'm assuming we are leaving at least 20-30GB of the capacity 'untouched' to get these benefits from our SSD's).


The choice to not partition is definitely up to the individual - however, the benefits of partitioning (HDD and/or SSD's) greatly out-weight the small additional time it takes to properly setup and configure a system. And the benefits are seen/felt/enjoyed for the life of the system it was intelligently applied to.

 

I don't know the reasons either. All I know is I've seen several examples of people getting bad performance or loosing performance on partitioned SSDs. When I told them to remove partitioning performance went back to normal.

 

SSDs have none of the access issues that made partitioning advantageous on spinning drives. All sectors are equally accessible at the same speed. To a certain extent it can be helpful to use partitions to divide where data and programs are stored. But most modern backup programs are a lot more flexible, making it much easier to identify and exclude what is or isn't desired in a backup. That makes it a lot less necessary to use partitions.

In some cases it's advantageous to use partitions and even multiple drives. But not as much as it used to be. Once upon a time when machines had a lot less RAM it was sometimes worthwhile to have a separate HD just for temp or paging data. This kept I/O to the data and programs separate. It helped avoid the drive thrashing from one part of the platters all the way to another part. It was also helpful to avoid fragmentation by setting up contiguous pagefiles. Way back when it was even considered necessary to control WHERE on the spindle some files were located. The theory being you could wring out just enough of a performance boost by keeping the drive heads in the center of the spindle instead of leaping all over the place. None of that is relevant on SSDs anymore. There's no seek time, all sectors are equally accessible.

If you decide to use partitions on an SSD it's important to get the start of the partition aligned to a boundary that's a multiple of 64. MS defaults to starting the first partition at the 63rd sector. This can cause a degree of performance penalty. Use a 'parted' boot CD to set up the partitions. Or move an existing partition (shrinking it if necessary) up to a 64 multiple. I did this for a 60gb ZIF SSD I put in an ancient Sony VAIO T350P. I posted about it here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/sol...087-ssd-upgrade-ancient-sony.html#post7659548

And pet peeve alert: it's spelled losing. Adding more o's doesn't make it the right spelling.

 

As I have tested potential SSD's with no partitioning schemes and when I finally decide to purchase the same models in the same systems (and proceed to partition them...) I see no difference in the performance, I have to say that there must be something else going on there.

Especially with moving the users folder to another HDD/SSD - the O/S SSD is even more responsive when partitioned, in my experience.

 

Oh yeah, I forgot about that. So, I would never further partition my SSD As you said, backup software is more flexible and we have plenty of RAM.

 

Do you mean partitioning within a single OS or for dual-boot systems? I can live with a single partition for Windows, but Linux typically makes several partitions. Together with Windows, that makes at least 4 or 5 on my current system and I need this setup. Would that cause problems with an SSD?

 

There is no technically reason that multiple partition would have any impact on performance for SSD(negative or positive).

Partition for a Windows installation would be mainly for management purpose(as I know people prefer dumb partition backup scheme which I in general don't like for windows, for linux it may make sense).

 

No there is no reason and yes I've seen it several times. Maybe someone can show us some proof? Show us a CDM result for the drive partitioned as one, and then results per partition when it's divided in three partitions.

If you need it I would just go ahead. But I won't be surprised if your CrystalDiskMark performance doesn't look good.

How much of that you would notice in real life is another question. Not much probably.

 

Linux CAN be run on several partitions but there's no real need to do it. Especially not on a desktop machine. Once upon a time it was de rigeur to avoid having /boot / and /usr/local on the same partitions, along with swap. Mainly because if you filled up the root partition the machine would often crash horribly. But those days are long past, and it's unlikely to have that happen as much anymore. There's little preventing you from setting up Linux on only one partition, not even separating swap (use a file for it).

 

having a seperate /usr on linux has its advantage as you can change the system(even by reinstall the whole thing say from Debian to Red Hat) relatively easily without touching the /usr data(so long you keep your user id/group id unchange)

That unfortunately is not true for Windows as every new installation of Windows would have the security system totally re-initialized.

 

You can reinstall windows without any problems with security. Especially if the machine is a domain member.

There's a lot more to an OS install than the /usr portion of the filesystem. Having just that separate would not accomplish what you're suggesting.

Besides, how often is a total reinstall of the OS going to happen anyway? And how sensible would it be to do it without a full backup?

 

If you are using AD sure, but many people don't.

Of course you have to reinstall the equivalent application but that is true for all OS.

I believe you have misread what I meant. If you read back, you would notice that I am against seperate partition(in particular in Windows as it was not designed from day 1 for that kind of setup) and that under linux it may make sense because the unix traditional has a very clear cut between user and system.

 

Clear cut? Clearly you've not actually setup and administered too many actual unix-based machines. I've dealt with thousands of them over many decades. Yes, it's supposed to be but way too many systems make a mess of it. But this isn't the thread for this discussion.

 

^ What he says.

And yes, I've experience with it would and I advice the same. From december' 10 until april '11 I had a SSD with two different partitions. One for my OS (Snow Leopard) and apps and one for my stuff like music and videos. Both partitions were underprovisioned.

For the first two months it worked fine and I didn't had any performance degradation. But after a while I got performance degradation on my OS partition. I tried to restore the performance (zero filling, deleting apps and stuff to create more free space) but it didn't help. My stuff partition was still working fine and the performance was fine from that partition.

So, my idea was to restore the performance of the SSD to the original state. My first idea was to zero fill the SSD in Linux but I couldn't boot from my burned DVD. I gave up and started with reinstalling Snow Leopard. I've repartitioned my SSD and created one partition. After that I've installed Snow Leopard and started with benching with Xbench and AJA Disk Test. I got my original performance back and I've still my original performance since april.

For example, these are my results:

​

 

that is getting a bit personal, don't you think ?