Partitioning Benefits (Smaller Drive)

OK, so I just bought a "portable" notebook (VAIO TT series) -- for work / travel.

Its nice and light, not powerful (1.2GHz, Core 2 Duo, 3GB RAM, 120GB Hard Drive - 100GB "usable") -- at any rate, its 1.3kg and very portable.

My question is with regards to partitioning benefits.

Obviously, if I had a computer with, say, 300GB+, I'd definitely partition it, but with roughly 100GB to work with, is it worth all of the trouble?

If I did it, I'd go with prolly a 60/40 split giving the C:/ drive 60GB (and most of the apps / heavy programs) and a D:/ drive for files...

But the question stands, with just 100GB to work with is it worth the trouble? will i see a noticeable performance improvement?

Thanks

 

Pretty much 0% benefit on that system.

 

I've been wondering about this too, would it beneficial for my system?

 

Does it really improve performance if you split 300+GB? I believe the only benefits of splitting on any HDD are convenience and relative data safety. However, personally, I would split even 40GB HDD.

 

Partitioning isn't really a lot of trouble, is it? I partitioned a 64gb ssd just so I don't have to worry about my data when reinstalling os...vista to w7, and probably back to vista some day.

 

I'd really like to know what the benefits of partitioning are aside from convenience. I believe I read somewhere that if you partition your drive just right and install the OS on the outer edge of the partition then you will get a performance increase. How that's done, I have no idea.

 

If you have all your personal data on a second partition, it is very easy to format the OS partition in case of an emergency, without going through the hassle of backing up the data on to an external disk. I think this is the biggest advantage.

Other than that, having a smaller partition also means shorter defragment time, therefore you can regularly defrag the OS partition to get the best performance. Smaller partitions with few files are also faster to access.

I guess you could also keep two copies of your most important files on the two partitions, so you can recover at least one copy in the unlikely case of a file allocation table corruption (perhaps the least significant reason to have multiple partitions).

 

partitioning has its benefits.
For example, when you format the drive, you create a barrier on the drive. The primary partition will always use the outer part of the drive, where the drive is the fastest. The harddrive is faster on the outside because the harddrive consists of circular patters. The further out you go on the drive, the circumference increases. Thus more data is on the outer part of the drive, and the drive is faster.
If you partition the drive you will have faster access times on the outer part of the drive, cause that partition uses the fastest part of the drive.
Whether its noticeable, I cant say. But I believe nbr member jissac did some benchies a while back, and the access time was indeed faster on the first primary partition.

That being said if its not a hassel, partition the drive, and install the operating system, and programs in the first partition to optimize performance

K-TRON

 

Honestly though, it takes like 5 minutes to transfer your files to an external hard drive and then another 5 minutes to transfer them back after you format. This shouldn't be the only advantage.

 

Interesting, thanks for this. So how big should the primary partition for the OS be on say a 320GB HDD?

 

The outer edge of the hdd is simply where your first partition is. If you limit your OS to that part, it prevents system files to be fragmented over the HDD which will help with random reads and access time, and also help with linear transfer time since it's limited to the faster part. It's easy to see if you do a benchmark of your hdd with say hdtune, the first part of the hdd is substantially faster and have lower acess time than the other part. Doing this is called "short stroking" as it shortens the movement range of the read head has to travel to look for data. I've read somewhere that if you take a modern high density disk and short-stroke the OS to the outer rim, it will perform as fast as a velociraptor.
My 80gig hdd has a 20gig OS partition. I don't think it's insignificant. XP would even fit in little more than 7 or 8gig with all the productivity software included if you nlite it a bit. If you want to put in modern games, i'd say 20gig is safe, 40gig would be ample. The smaller is the better, as to limit fragmentation. Though you should leave enough space that NTFS has at least some 20% free space to deal with, for the MFT or journaling or whatever that NTFS does.

EDIT: K-TRON beat me to it. The reason for this is the angular velocity remains constant (say 5400rpm) but the linear velocity increases as you move outward on a spinning disc.

 

it depends on the drive. The best way to figure this out is to run a hdtune bench without any partition.
If you look at the benchmark, you will be able to see where the drive starts to drop in speed.
Look down to what percentage of the drive that is, and than multiply it out to see how big the first partition should be.
Usually the first 10-20% of the drive is consistently fast, and that drops off pretty fast.

K-TRON

 

As K-tron said, the "front" of the disk (first part available for partitioning) will always be the outer tracks which have the most data per rotation on them. If you partition out this space for the OS and related stuff and then put media and other less access dependent files on a secondary partition you can gain some performance. For example I have a 10gb slice out of my scorpio for all my temp files and page file for my xp install on my SSD. The place where you can get a crazy big advantage with this is when you're using intel's matrix raid setup, if you run a raid 0 off the first say 30-40 gb of two drives for 60-80GB total you get a REALLY fast stripe set, then you can use the rest in JBOD or raid 1 for storage space. Jeeze, you guys were all replying again while I wrote my first reply, lol

 

I was about to partition my drive, when I saw this article. Is it accurate?

 

If you can't boot the OS, then how are you going to transfer the files ?? You'll have to boot with a Linux live CD or something similar.


Performance is also another advantage; smaller partition with a relatively small number of files (i.e : OS files and program files) means faster access time / defrag time; Opposed to a very large partition with tens of thousands of files.

 

Well, even if winXP does rearange it's most often used files (are they thinking defragging?) that it needs large free space to work with (swap in swap out stuff) above a certain point the free space it needs becomes insignificant. Think of how much you need, and then leave some headroom for at least 20% free space and you'll be fine, the advantages outweight any downside in my opinion.

 

I don't see how partitioning can obstruct the optimization of frequently used applications and the swap file. The so called optimizations are actually a combination of defragmenting and moving those files to the edge of the disk, partitioning will not intervene with this process as long as you have enough free space. They don't give a valid technical reason; Therefore I wouldn't believe everything on that article...

 

wow, thanks for all of the responses...

i think when i have time, i may go ahead and partition it... that will mean re-installing minor programs, but i guess it may be worth the headache.

on my main machine (desktop replacement laptop) which is 300GB I've got four partitions:

1) Primarily the O/S
2) All programs
3) All Data files
4) Backup (Acronis backups)

 

Hi Ghost-Rider,

On your 300GB ... what OS you have and what are your 4 Partitions sizes!?!?

G!

 

If your going to bother to partition for speed, it would make the most sense to me to do something along the following, assuming someone hybernates more than restarting, and has 3-4GB of RAM:

1. 6GB: Pagefile (~1GB) + Hybernation file (4GB)
2. 20GB: OS (Vista will use about 10-15GB
3. 50GB: Programs
4. 100GB: Data

Note, I have a 500GB and thus filling <200GB makes sense to leave programs relativly large, if you have a smaller drive and don't game much you might want less as all of your data will be slower the larger it gets.

Even more important: Adding space to a partition that isn't directly in contact with the space there can be risky. If you start with 1 through 4, then expand 3, 4, and 2 respectly in order to get all remaining space, you could end up with the following:
Sections: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 3 - 4- 2

This leaves the OS is pretty much the fastest section, but also the slowest. If any of your files get moved to the second section, you'll get a horrible slow down.

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Overall I would tell you that your best off leaving everything in one section. Its easier to maintain and you can enjoy programs installing themselves into the right place, instead of having to do it yourself because your drive letters don't make any sense.

Another note here, you could use the program partition as a folder extention and the data as the documents folder extension, thus leaving your PC to think it as just one continous section, but then why did you break it apart?

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Short version: Get your sizes right the first time, and relize the faster you make your OS or programs, or whatever, the slower you make everything else. The best way to deal with this is to use as little space as possible so everything is fast (and you thought your stolen music liberary was free...).

 

Ok so I decided to experiment with this a couple of hours ago. I didn't do a clean install, I just decided to shrink my existing volume and create a new partition just to test the theory out. Using the built in Vista disk management tool was splitting my disk in half and it wouldn't let me shrink it anymore so I had to used gparted. I have a 200GB HDD and I shrunk the primary partition to 60GBs and created a second partition for the rest. BIG MISTAKE. Not only did it take gparted about an hour and a half to complete the procedure, but upon rebooting my notebook, I got a nice error screen that said that my Windows OS is corrupt or damaged and I need to have the original Vista installation disc to repair it.

Of course I didn't have this on me, so I had to take a 40 minute trip back home to get my installation disc and then drive all the way back - the whole time freaking out that my notebook would have to be formatted because I screwed everything up. Luckily, the Vista disc fixed everything after installation a couple of boot files and running chkdsk.

Good thing it's all okay now.

 

Vista Ultimate.

Basically its roughly (i have to increase / decrease partitions every now and then):

- 50GB (O/S)
- 50GB (Programs)
- 100GB (Files)
- 100GB (Backup / Miscellaneous)

The last drive gets a fair amount of usage -- things like "dumping" files from work / friends and then deleting... music / videos that I know I'll be clearing out of my system on a temporary basis, etc.

I like the setup since when I do backups (Acronis True Image), I've got 3 "clean" segments -- 1) my O/S, 2) all my other Progs, 3) my files.

I backup my files the most since I rarely change my O/S (other than the odd Vista update -- which actually FUBAR'd my system last week -- but thanks to Acronis and frequent backups, getting my O/S back up to prestine Windows pre-update status was a few clicks away)

Anyways, I'll have to roll-up my sleeves and do a major overhaul on my mini-system over the next week... I have the computer just like I want it now, before it hit me that it just might be worth partitioning even with a tiny HD... oh well, the inner geek in me is kind of looking forward to it...

 

We wouldn't know as you don't have your harddrive listed in the sign.

These benefits of getting the most out of the harddrive is only true with mechanical harddrives as they have platters that spins.

But as you say, another benefit is that you don't need to format the whole drive when reinstalling.




Anyways, to really show why it get's faster to partition a harddrive, look at for example my benchmark of the harddrive. This applies to any mechanical harddrive as the curve is not linear, always faster in the beginning(the outer edge of the platters) of a benchmark slowly going down to the slower part of the harddrive (the inner part of the platters).



Partitioning the first 10% to one 32GB harddrive would give you like 85MB/s average and lower accesstimes, as you can see my illustrating skills here:


It'll use only the "black" part of the harddrive. So the logic should be obvious that it's faster there, when only using that part of the HDD

 

i never get how people create an own partition for programs. it's not like they can live on their own. on a reinstall one has to reinstall (most of) them as well.

and for performance, it's better, if they are on the same partition, too. else, starting an app means, the head has to switch between the system partition and the programs partition everytime. that means, whenever an app starts and requires some system files (like, uhm, every app), the head has to switch around. if it's in the same partition, program and system data can be located very closely.

i don't partition anymore. i let my defragmentation tool collect data together the best way instead of me forcing my system to rely on what i like the best.

 

I got like 28(!!) apps that i have in a separate folder (that i copy over to C: when i need to reinstall windows), those apps runs without having the need to be reinstalled, also most of my games doesn't need a reinstall aslong as you know what you're doing, i've saved all of the d3dx****.dll's that the games needs and just copy/paste them to the system32-foilder after a reinstall, instead of having the need to reinstall all games and apps (which could take atleast an hour when you have games that takes up alot of space), it only takes maximum 5mins to have them small files copied and ready to go!


RAM is very good to have in those cases when you run applications however, so the head only needs to change "place" when you start up the application. BUT, even though you have applications on the same partition the head needs to switch place anyhow, but not aslong as the other alternative, though it shouldn't be a noticeable difference between the two options.

A defrag takes longer if you have one big partition, also most people that's technical wants the computer to do as theyself wants it to do and not the other way around.

Also having an own partition for the OS doesn't have any downsides.
If something unexpected happens and you have to reinstall windows, you don't want to sweep your whole harddrive, that only makes the process longer to "recover" to the state you want it to be, and you have to do a lengthy procedure if you had important files saved on the harddrive that you haven't backed up yet.

+ Safer
+ Less time to defrag
+ Increased performance
+ Less time to recover from a reinstall