Partitioning for Performance: Hitachi 7K500 Benchmark Setup Specifics

Run a disk benchmark like HD Tune on your hard drive. Notice how the speed is much higher in the beginning and tapers off substantially about 20% in. Now set HD Tune to short stroke the drive to about 10-20% of it's total capacity. Notice how the speed remains airly constant and the access time is significally lower than it was on the other test? By putting the operating system and applications in a partition at the first part of the drive you are keeping it all in the fastest part of the drive. This guide tends to take it to an extreme, but a basic 2 partition setup with the OS and apps in the first partition and all of the data in the second can make a system significantly quicker and more responsive.

It also makes it easier when you have to re-install Windows as all of your data is in a separate partition.

 

Well I knew already that having your os on the outer layer of your drive is 'faster' than having it on the inner layer. I also knew the fact about having 2 partitions the way you stated but I don't see how '4' could make a real difference. I suppose it's ok for categorising 'fast (to) slow' drives. Or something, 1 being the fastest and 4 being the slowest. But the performance increase in my opinion isn't that much better... really placement of files on the HDD is overrated.

 

The difference in performance between the 2 partitions and 4 isn't large enough to be worthwhile in the tests I've done on it in the past. I don't have any of the benches from when I did it, but it I didn't find it worth the amount of work it took to set it up that way. Unlike the 2 partition method where you could normally feel the difference over a single partition, you would more than likely need benchmarks to notice the difference between the 2 and 4 partition method.

 

How can you tell though using Windows partition manager when installing Windows 7 that you are indeed making a partition of space on the 'outer' layer of the drive... or is that just where the first partition is created by default?

That might be a sort of stupid question..

So if you cut your disc into 4 pieces and the 4th one had the remaining amount of disk space in it, that would be the centre section of the drive...?

I understand the purpose now. But the speed difference having your os in the outer rim of your drive isn't that high... I've done benchmarks before after moving all of the files with defragging programs.

 

first time I read that 1-st post i was ready to say something like: And what about 5-th partition for music and 6-th for 2-nd temporary partition for 1-st temporary partition but than I understood how big was job to write all that and that everyone has its own opinion. Besides I took many things from here.
As for me the best way is to do is C drive for OS about 40-50GB, D drive for everything else (without doing recovery partition for iso images and other and other) and 1GB RamDisk for Temp and Firefox cache. My Documents folder goes to drive D and My Music, My Images, My Video and other folders go to My documents. So it will be very easy to open them through Start Panel.

EDIT: I have already spend hours for proving performance improving thanks to Defrag programs and parts of HDD. Sometimes after 5 hundred and 1 question for "reallifeprovesIcanseewritenownotinbenchmarks" and other I just want to find that guy, hit him using bat and say: Just Trust!
That's why I ask you just believe that there is a difference and it may vary of tasks you doing or processes running.

 

I might make a 50-60gb partition on my new 750GB Scorpio Black just for the OS if it'll be faster and put everything else on the other partition or I might leave it just as 1 partition. This thread didn't 'sell' it's idea of better performance. I can now sort of understand the rationale though.

 

You can't think of this logically (when you don't know all the facts) and come to the conclusion that this is a merely a waste of time.

First, here is some proof that this method makes the drives as fast as they possibly can be:

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/sol...le-copy-result-hdds-ssds-easy-comparison.html


As you can see from the above results, my setups with the exact same HDD's consistenly outperform all others (min. 14% to 51% faster).

This is so fast, in fact, that they even outperform (in this test) at least one SSD and come 'dangerously' close to a second SSD too.


Now, even though you say you read the whole thread, let me repeat/introduce some things:

I have been constantly tunining this method of running my systems for almost a couple of decades - any changes I introduce are not merely for the sake of change, but because they give a real improvement to real world use of the systems in question for my particular usage (last dozen yrs being digital photo editing).

Also, keep the following points in mind:

Anything on C: drive will run slower than it can when installed on another partition (i.e. not the boot/system/OS partition).

Multiple partitions allow you to defrag your 'working' partition (my 'T' drives) very quickly and immediately see a performance increase. Compared to defragging the whole 'C:' drive, the time difference is astronomical - especially when what gives us a real 'boost' is not the files that are defragged - but the free space that is defragged.

Creating a disk structure that takes this into consideration (as I have over the years) allows me to leave C: alone as long as possible (only 'touched' every MS Update Tuesday each month) while I can defrag the 'T' partition not only each day - but each time I start a new project each day too (that's how fast it is when it's on a seperate partition).

Also, the use of PerfectDisk Professional is essential to keeping the performance of the system at it's peak with the least amount of 'maintenance' work needed. This is because with PD11 Pro you can specify how each partition is in fact defragged - better matching the defrag pattern to the actual files stored on that partition (and how they're typically accessed) while also making the system less likely to fragment in the first place.

As also mentioned: this is not the fastest you can make your system/drive with the advice I offer here: this is the fastest the system is overall with the minimum amount of maintenance needed to sustain this high level of performance.

For surfing the web, watching movies, updating your facebook status - this is overkill.

For generating ~3TB of data writes to the drive as I do each couple of weeks, this is a 'make or break' kind of deal for me.


If you're buying/setting up a new HDD with a clean install and decide that a single partition is better - then you're definitely not into a high performance/responsive system - especially when you're considering a single partition on a 750GB (or larger) drive.

Going to more partitions (than 2...), 'optimally', will require some thought on your part of how you use your system(s) and also demand you use a product like PD Pro if you really want your system(s) at some minimum level of performance (note: PD Pro is the only defragger I would ever recommend though).


As this was originally posted over a year ago, you can imagine that I've further tweaked this method.

For a 2011 take of partitioning with PD11 Pro that still **rivals SSD's based systems; stay tuned for an updated partitioning guide 'soon'.

(**Rivals SSD's when capacity, sustained performance and $$$ are all equally important - along with the fact that most of my notebook systems can only have a single HDD currently - hopefully, sometime in 2011 this will change, as will the successor to this guide).

 

Ok that was much easier to understand than your first post. You might want to add that in there somewhere if you want.

I'll definitely try this out then with my 750Gb Scorpio Black when I get it. Honestly you explained everything much better this time around, maybe it was to do with the fact that it's been another year or something and you know more. Thanks for taking the time to explain this all over again for me, I'm sure others will benefit from it as well..

I'll try your method in a week or so when I am done moving all this data and I'll see exactly what kind of a boost it gives my system. I'm not going to ignorantly refuse to do something that will make my computer that much faster, especially when I spend more time doing less every single day anyway.

Once again thanks mate.

 

Hey, you're welcome.

This latest post though doesn't show how to do anything (only hints of why you'd want to).

I too just clicked buy now for a WD 750GB 7200 RPM drive - I hope it is at least as usable as my Hitachi, Scorpio Black and XT's are (all 500GB's).

What kind of uses do you put your system(s) to, btw?

 

But an overview helps us absorb parts of your decades of testing. So thank you. I did a onetime read of your 1st post. I got the gist very easily but to say I fully comprehended specifics would be untrue. I would just need to do a more (even a few) critical reads.

I do partition but you brought up a few things that are contrary to what I thought. I might use some of your ideas as my reasons were much more general but yours are sounding interesting.

Nice write up.

 

Thanks for the feedback.

I'll be sure to be more indepth in the next partitioning update.

 

Hello to the OP. I just installed a new Seagate Momentus XT with a fresh install of Windows 7 x64 in my DM1z. I partitioned along the same lines of your advice, however, the first partition that you made 64GB, I changed to 30GB and moved the extra space into the primary C: partition. Can you tell me why you made the Pagefile/DL/TMP partition so big? I'm thinking that I'll even install a load heavy game into this outer partition as well, because even at 30GB, I feel like it's a lot of wasted space in the most "performance oriented" portion of the HDD. As far as the inside 64GB portion that you use for backup, that's a lot of excess space as well, but I don't really care about that space much, because 500GB is realistically more than I actually need on a laptop hard drive.

On the outer 30GB partition, I got:
100MB sequential - 107.6MB/s read, 104MB/s write
4K Random - .690MB/s and 1.129/MB/s

In the Primary OS drive (134GB, 2nd partition), I got:
100MB sequential - 98.83MB/s read, 93.64MB/s write
4K Random - .58MB/s and 1.035/MB/s


On the innermost 64GB partition I got:
100MB sequential - 65.12MB/s read, 63.89MB/s write
4K Random - .701MB/s and .850/MB/s

It is interesting to note that the 4k random reads are slowest in the primary OS drive. I'm assuming this is because this drive is 4 times bigger than the pagefile drive (outside 30GB) and twice as big as the inside partition (64GB)...

 

I need a big Temp partition because when I'm stitching panoramas, the Scratch disk that PS uses can balloon to over 30-50 GB easily.

The biggest reason for the slow 4K times is because it simply is the O/S partition - this is also why the 'T' temp partition is so useful and consistently fast: it doesn't have to deal with the slowdown that the O/S partition will always impart (even if the O/S is placed at the outer edge of the platter.

 

Makes sense. I do all my photoshopping on my desktop, so it won't be a concern here.

 

Hi there, tilleroftheearth. Thanks a lot for detailed article. Could you please give me your quick view as to how you would apply your partitioning strategy in the following circumstances:

I just purchased a 320Gb Momentus XT to replace my current 5400RPM 320Gb system drive, which had a single partition and was less than half used. There is another physical 320Gb drive in the laptop used for data storage (D: DATA). I was thinking of shortstroking the XT to 112Gb (35% of total capacity) and then partitioning it to a T: of 48Gb and C: of 64Gb. Alternatively, I was thinking of setting up Acronis TrueImage Recovery partition on the rest of the unallocate space, which as far as I understand shouldn't impact daily performance?

The laptop is used for general use, gaming, and some light audio editing and video encoding. It has 4Gb RAM, Win7 x64 and Core 2 Duo E8435 3.06 GHz CPU.

Thanks in advance!

 

KaKTy3,

Your plan sounds fine!

Just keep in mind that with two physical HDD's in a system the drive letters will be a little wonky (if this is the first time you've tried multiple partitions per drive).

Basically, you will make the 64GB, the 48GB partition and the remaining capacity as your TI Recovery partition and have the 2nd HDD with your data on it. If you have all those partitions formatted while installing Win7, the drive letters will become as follows when you boot up into Windows:

C: (64GB) will be C: drive (Windows always gives the boot/system volume the C: drive designation - no matter where the partition is on a drive).

D: (320GB) will be your physically seperate Data drive.

E: (48GB) will be your 'T' partition (first partition after the 100MB partition Win7 automatically makes to ensure the drive is 'aligned').

F: (320-64-48 or ~208GB) will be your TI Recovery partition.


To Label the drive letters as you wish, you can re-label the drive letters once Windows is fully installed. Or, simply leave the 48GB and the 208GB partitions unformatted (but make sure you create them...). Then, in Windows Disk Management, format the drives and name them the drive letters you prefer. (Just note that the first partition of the physically seperate HDD will always be D: drive; you can switch/change it, but I would not recommend doing so.

Hope I have given you the information you need?

If you can hold off of this re-install for a few days, I will be updating this guide (in a different/seperate thread...).

It may be worth waiting for - even though it will be written around an SSD based system (with one or two HDD's installed alongside the SSD).


I also feel obligated to mention that after almost a year of using multiple XT's (500GB models), I have seen them all fail. I do not trust these drives any more in any of my installs, but they are the fastest mechanical drives overall - only exceeded by an WD Scorpio Black 750GB (with the noted partitioning strategy...).

Use yours and enjoy the speed - but make sure you are doing backups religiously. (Hopefully, the model differences mean that your's will not boot up with a message about 'insert boot device into system' or some such error.

Good luck.

 

Thanks again, tilleroftheearth. Very comprehensive. I am unlikely to get to this little project until Saturday, so you still have time Good advice on partitioning, I shall go the disk management route then.

Noted re XT's reliability. As my data sits on the separate physical drive, which is backed up constantly to a cloud, I am less worried about the system drive failing, as I will be backing up reasonably often to an external drive.

Looking forward to the updated guide, which should be definitely stickied!

 

Just curious, are you russian-language? You have specific nickname

 

Does this still apply for Windows 7 & Mac OSX 86?

How would this work for Multi OS Boot scenarios?

 

Sorry for replying so late crashnburn,

This does apply to Win7 (used for this tutorial...), but would have no idea on how to apply it to Mac OS/X.

Need to find time to update this to 2011 and SSD standards!

 

tilleroftheearth - Wow, so impressed with your OP I had to register for this forum just to ask some follow up... I know the focus of the forum is notebooks but I've got a desktop question that should be applicable.

I'm also a photographer, using LR3 and PS on a Win7 machine. I've got a 128GB Crucial M4 SSD waiting at home for a fresh install of Win7, then I've got the old system HDD (320GB 5400rpm) and data drive HDD (1TB 7200rpm).

Could you give me a 'preview' of your 2011 update with SSD considerations? Specifically;

1. SSD Setup (1 - 100mb Win 7, 2 - remainder for OS) or (try and carve out a small 'T' partition in the SSD)?
2. If I keep the SSD OS only, would I benefit from a 320GB 7200rpm drive (or perhaps a hybrid ssd) as a large, dedicated 'T' drive? Or perhaps split for apps that don't fit the main SSD and 'T'?
3. For the 'D' storage volume, is there much advantage to be gained in partitioning this in some way?
4. Finally, not sure if you are a Lightroom user, but I am and re-linking images in a catalog is a PAIN... any thoughts on that or tips?

Thanks again, and I'm definitly looking forward to your full SSD redux of the OP.

Tony

 

Just delete all partitions and when installing choose SSD to install Windows. It will create automatically 2 partitions. I personally see no need to create data partition on it except... have some place after deleting OS partition. And there is NO need to create temp or else.
You may reallocate profile folder to HDD but I prefer to reallocate only profile subfolders which is much easily and you make usual windows install without modding.

 

I did a bunch of such stuff a long time back.. Tons of partitions and Multi OS boots. I want to do the same soon.

Maybe I'll share the direction and you can share some experiences and inputs?

What say?

PS: When you planning to updated this to 2011 standards?

 

Tony,

Thank you for your kind words. Hope the following is enough to get you started in the right direction:

1. Hint: Don't use (all) the rest of your capacity for the O/S. How much do your O/S and programs take now? 25-35GB? Try setting C: to ~50GB (15GB free). For the rest, use the move the Users folder method to make it your 'work/play' space. If your normal/daily projects are ~20GB from start (downloading RAW Files) to finished images, then make the 'E:' drive (your second HDD's first partition will become the 'D:' drive) on the SSD as small as possible to overprovision the drive. This will allow the drive to have a lower write amplification factor which will not only keep your system running as fast as it can, over time, but also greatly extend the amount of writes you do to the drive. If you can effectively use half the nand for 'over-provisioning' then you can effectively stop worrying about wearing out the drive/nand cells before you need a faster/larger or simply, a newer SSD.

2. Forget about this old idea of 'T' and most of the other partitions with 2 drives (SSD/HDD). The best drive (always) to get is the latest, largest and fastest drive available. Right now it is the Hitachi 7K750, in a few weeks it could be the new XT Hybrid - 8GB SSD + 750GB or larger capacity (crosses fingers!). Also, if you use the entire capacity of the drive - you are simply going to get less and less performance from it - compared to a partitioned one. Most uses (even mine!) don't require more than 64-100GB 'temp' space before a project is deemed 'finished'.

3. Is there a benefit to partitioning a second (DATA) drive? Well, there is, if you want the fastest possible system (over time). To make the most of your two drive setup, I would be setting up a partition of around 50-100GB for Scratch files for PS/LR - and also setting the LR data base there too (unless yours can fit on the small SSD and still leave some unallocated space for performance enhancing over-provisioning). If this drive is partitioned, formatted and present at the time of your Win O/S install, it will become your 'D:' drive - so keep the (weird Windows) drive naming quirks in mind - especially as you're deciding which drive the 'Users' folder will be going to.


4. Yeah, LR user myself - the only tip here is to keep your images in a single directory then you only have to point to one folder and they should all be 'linked' automatically. For example - if you have a 3TB (or larger...) external drive(s) keep all your images under a 'P' folder (p for pictures)... I also don't store the LR edits in the (internal) database - I use the side-files - this way, I can simply re-import my images and all edits are available - whether or not it is my LR program I am running or not.


Overall:
What you are basically doing is trying to leave 50% free on the SSD. Using the second HDD as a 'backup' for PS/LR's scratch disks - if needed. And forcing yourself to move/archive daily projects to the DATA drive and leaving the SSD in as pristine a state as possible (pristine=performance!).

While it may seem like leaving 50% of an SSD is 'wasteful' - consider the issues I have faced. Using much more than even 60% (filled) made my HDD faster, overall than using the SSD options at the time (especially considering moving/juggling data on the small capacities SSD's offer at this time). So, the real 'waste' in my mind would be to buy an SSD (spend your $$$!!!), and get HDD performance levels too (immediately or in the near future, depending on how closely your workflow matches mine).

I don't have more time to reply right now - hope this is enough for now.

Good luck.

I'm working on this as we speak/type!

But, boy, it is going to be long...

 

Hello tilleroftheearth and all,

First of all, congratulations and thank you on your experiments and sharing the results, I see several discussions that point here and to the " Move Windows 7 User folder and ProgramData folder to separate drive or partition" thread.

I am now in the processes of replacing the WD 160GB 5400RPM HD on my ThinkPad X200 for a Seagate Momentus XT 750GB Hybrid HD, and am setting up the directories as you suggested here and the unattended mod.

If I understood correctly, it is now more generally accepted the method for separating the entire user profiles right from install using the unattended routine more effective, right?

Is there anyone that can help me, or have any suggestions regarding the temporary folders / file that was proposed to have on the T: drive (first partition on the disk).

In this thread it was mentioned redirecting the Users and System TMP and TEMP folders to the T: drive using the Environment Variables Redefinition.

Now can someone help me with these matters?:

1. Aren't there e few other directories/files that would have similar characteristics and should/could also live on the T: drive? For instance: AppData, Hibernate files, etc... What would be other good candidates for the T: drive?

2. Specifically the AppData folder, wouldn't the T: drive be the best place for it? What do you suggest to be the best way to move it?

3. Specifically for the ProgramData, in a few scripts that are focusing on freeing up space on the C: drive, people suggest to install that in another drive. If the focus is on speed (not space as all will be under the same hybrid drive in my notebook), do you know if it makes any difference if it stays on the C: or is moved to T: drive?

4. If I am using the unattended install to place the User Profiles folder on the D: drive, couldn't I add to the xml script the parameters for Windows to locate all of the temporary directories on the T: drive as well? As opposed to redirect them later using the environmental variables definitions? If so, do you have any idea what would be the script for that?

Again thank you for sharing your experiments and knowledge and any help.

Best regards,
Daniel