Partitions

What are partitions and should I delete or format them? If my computer is virus free would I need them?

For an HP Pavilion zv6000.

 

Opinions will differ on the use of partitions, I use them, others will vote aganst them.

A partition will create 1, 2 or more virtual drives on one HDD

So in control panel it will show 2 HDDs even though you have only one physca HDD.

If you partition an empty HDD it can speed up the OS by installing the OS on the faster part of the drive.

Personally I'd say have one OS & software partition and one data partition.

 

I believe in multiple partitions. There are several advantages including:

1. Keep the operating system files in the first, and fastest, partition and any archive files in the last, and slowest partition.

2. Keep the user files out of the operating system partition. If Windows gets corrupted and you have to reformat C: then you don't lose your files because they are in another partition.

John

 

I have multiple partitions. In case I goof and completely corrupt the operating system, I can do a complete reinstall without losing my important data, pictures, etc...

 

#2 is my main reason also.

any "media" should be on a seperate partition as those files are indendant. This could be pictures, music, spread sheets, program installers, anything like that.

however your actual programs install path, or game install path should be on the C: with the OS as even if you had them safe somewhere else they will not function on the fresh OS install and would have to be installed again.

Your data aka "media" however has no such dependency and you want to keep it safe.

 

Partitions are just sliced portions of your HDDs memory, it enables you to create another drive. One good advantage of this is that if the worst event occurs and that you need to format your PC, you only need to format the partition wherein you installed your OS, therefore the other partition is safe.

 

1) not important on vista. and hindering once you have so much programs installed that they don't fit on c: / so much data that it doesn't fit on d:. so, you limit yourself arbitarely.

2) get a real backup system, and restore in some minutes from it. then, when your hdd dies, you still have all your data. and when something else bad happens that deletes your data on d:, too, you still have your data.

 

1), you won't limit yourself if you know what you're doing! Only a beginner would unwantingly create a too small partition for vista(or any other OS).
Just saying that i do not agree with what you said, as it doesn't make any sense.

2. A backup is always good on the most important files, but making a separate partition on one hard drive is not for making sure that a whole hard drive gets broken too still have your data left. It's for making it easier when you have to reinstall windows or if something f-ups the windows partition or such things. But first of all, to increase the performance. Defragmentation is easier to handle when you have a separate partition for windows. There is really no upside in having a whole partition taking up all space on one hard drive.

 

1) well, you do create artificial limits that may hit you later. maybe one year later, maybe two years later? i got hit by some limits years after setting them. what's the GAIN? none.

2) i never need reinstalling the os at all. and even then, i just get the data back from the network in some minutes. not really hurting at all.

 

You cant hit limits with partitions, you still have as much space.

If you make your C: too small you can still install programs to another directory, or you can just expand the partition. Vista has a non destructive partition manager built into it.

I agree a real backup system is the way to go, I plan to build myself a file server, but its expensive and its only part of the battle. Just because you can protect your data on the backup doesnt mean its not a good idea to protect your data at a lower level, plus I find partitions help with file organization too.

Even for the sake up backup, if the OS corrupted I could just restore the C: and that would be MUCH smaller than doing the C: & D: when the D: has hundreds of gigs of media.

 

well, if your c has 3gb left, and your d has 3gb left, now i have to resize partitions first, to temporarily store that iso dvd file to burn it? what do i gain?

if i would instead have simply a data-folder, i could just put in that iso and be done.

for file organisations, you really really really should use folders, that's what they're made for.

for a file server, i suggest you a windows home server, you can get one < 400$ easily. 330$ or so if you have 2+ hdd's lying around that you don't really use anymore. (if you want to know the specs of my homeserver, you can contact me).

i actually never had the os corrupt on me in a way i could not simply repair it without reinstall or backup recovering. if i did, then all data was lost, a.k.a. the whole hdd. so even if i may one day bite and have to restore the whole disk instead of "just c:", then i happily get another coke while it restores it's not like it's slow at all, really (at least, not on a gigabit lan. and for a restore, i happily plug my notebook on the gblan for short).

 

well, if your c has 3gb left, and your d has 3gb left, now i have to resize partitions first, to temporarily store that iso dvd file to burn it? what do i gain?

- No you need to make room you should have more than 3gb left but you can just move another file over. What a bad argument to try to make your point anybody can see through it.

if i would instead have simply a data-folder, i could just put in that iso and be done.

for file organisations, you really really really should use folders, that's what they're made for.

- My point was about when you need to backup/restore things the separate partitions takes just having separate folders to a whole new level.

for a file server, i suggest you a windows home server, you can get one < 400$ easily. 330$ or so if you have 2+ hdd's lying around that you don't really use anymore. (if you want to know the specs of my homeserver, you can contact me).

-Yep I already have my parts picked out but when my desktop had 3tb of stuff on it I need a server with atleast 3tb+ for backup so that hard drive stuff adds to cost. For redundancy I need a server with about 5TB on it. I build computers for a living I am sure I can pick parts

i actually never had the os corrupt on me in a way i could not simply repair it without reinstall or backup recovering. if i did, then all data was lost, a.k.a. the whole hdd. so even if i may one day bite and have to restore the whole disk instead of "just c:", then i happily get another coke while it restores it's not like it's slow at all, really (at least, not on a gigabit lan. and for a restore, i happily plug my notebook on the gblan for short).

- Thats good for you, same here but there are times where I install a new OS over the top of the old one, like say right now Testing windows 7, I dont want to be losing all my install programs & files each time I do it.

However it has happened to others, so just because something never happened to you doesnt mean you cant take it into account. Thats like saying just because you never got into a car accident you dont need to wear a seatbelt.

 

i just say it's something that should not happen often or at all. so if it happens to happen one time a year, you can relax on those 20min additional recovery time.

yep, my homeserver has 4.5tb.

and still you haven't shown one gain of having a datapartition over just use folders. yes, i don't have to repartition, you're right. then i just move data to my system-drive and should not forget to move them back later. so still, it's hassle. what for?

i do build and use pc's since years, too, so don't try to "show your knowledge". it's exactly that knowledge that is so dangerous, that "i know we've done it that way back in 98, so it has to be good over 10 years later.

partitioning is useless except for multi-os installations. and even those are most of the time useless thanks to virtualisation.

and for the hw parts, i would have suggested you mini-box.com, they have atom based hw for really cheap. one of those is my homeserver (yeah, with 4hdds in that don't fit into the case.. but that's manageable..).

and btw, if you'd have a home-server, and use it right, you would not have all (or any) data really locally on your system, because storing it on the homeserver is much more easy so you can access it from any device. then, you don't lose any data when you test out win7. like i didn't lose any. and restored my vista after the testing in minutes

the seatbelt analogy is very wrong. it would be right, if it would be about backups. the partitions are just making your life more complicated for a possible tiny gain in a convoluted situation that could be fixed much more simple (and in a much more general way) with backups.

 

Well to each his own, I cant convince you and you cant convince me but both sides have been argued so now the general public can decide for themselves.

I agree with having the data on the server, but a lot of my data is raw video and I need it local to work with it.

 

One major reason why I don't partition is because it'll slow your hdd down.. quite a lot actually.

With previous experiences, typical drive performance loss of a partitioned disk is about 25%. This is due to the high access time (drive head have to go back and force between each partition), lower throughput (the inner tracks of hdd are about 50% slower than outeredge), more power ussage (disk has to work harder because it has to access both partitions), more noise (disk has to work harder).

For me, I have dedicated backup solution. I can recover my data even with unbootable OS through a usb drive with windows PE or a XP installation on usb stick. For me, 25% performance loss with minimal advantages isn't the right choice for me.

If I ever partition, I will rarely make the 2 partition 2 drives. I always mount the 2nd partition inside C: as a folder for storage. E.g. Mount 2nd partition as "My documents" folder in C:.

 

Id neeed proof to back that statement up since my personal tests show otherwise, and I also never heard that before.

 

Here's some proof for you:
1) Download HDtune, and measure your hdd speed.
You'll see that your hdd's throughput is very high near the outter region of the disk where as the inner region, you get low throughtput.
2) When you do a random seek, the access time is very high, anywhere around 20ms+.
3) When you partition a drive, you're reserving portions of disk for each partition. If your C:/ drive is the 1st partition, it'll reserve the 1st portion of the drive from the outer track to your desired track that you want to end the partion. If your D:/ drive is the 2nd partition, the partition will start at the track after C:/ up until the last track on the disk. This will limit the throughtput of D:/ drive to a low value, thus a dramatic decrease in performance.
4) When you want to access both the data and the OS files, the hdd head must first access the OS, then move the head to the outer section, access the data, then move back to the OS. This takes a very long time thus further decreasing performance/responsiveness. All this disk thrashing will sometimes cause the computer to become non-responsive.
5) When you're accessing from OS drive to another partition, it's easier to create fragments which will decrease the hdd performance, especially when you continue to fill the hdd up.

A real life example which I encounter every day.
I boot up windows Xp 20 seconds on a netbook, that's very fast right? This is due to the fact I organize my startup programs, core OS files, person data..etc to the edge of the hdd to ensure very fast throughtput thus decreasing my boot time dramatically. I've also optimized my hibernation file so my netbook comes out of hibernation in 5-10 seconds.
If I had my data, programs and OS on different partition, my boot time will probably in the range of 40 seconds, double of what I have right now. That's 50% performance decrease or put in a better term, 100% performance increase from having 2 separate partition.

I coudl explain everything in more detail...but I think the explaination above pretty much covers the major points. If you have any doubts, you can search google or ask me for more proof. I can write you 5 page of notes if you're really curious. LOL

 

I already know that, but thats also my proof in the same thing you said (well most of it) is my hdtune results did not change after partitioning my drives.

also you have to run the test as a 2nd drive to be accurate you can use a drive that has the OS running on it and actuality consider it valid for anything.

 

HD tune only proves that there are variations in throughput in different area of the hdd. It does not test the througput of each partition thus your 1st statement is false.

BTW.. if you didn't already find out, HDtune preloads the itself to the RAM thus have minimal effect on the HDD benchmark. There are occasional disk access which shows as dips in the hdd benchmark. HDD tune is a rather rough estimation of disk performance so such small effect will not cause a big change in the final result.

Here's a real life test. Copy a 10 gig file to your C drive and do the same to D drive. Compare the difference and you'll know approximately the performance impact partitioning the hdd makes. On a optimized hdd, both transfer should finish about the same amount of time. I doubt that's the case if you had 2 partitions.

The performance hit will be more dramatic if you're accessing files from both partition at the same time. You'll probably notice about 500%-1000% slow down in hdd throughput.
Here's a simple way to test it.
1st, copy 2x10GB of file to C drive at once. record the time
2nd, copy 10gb of file to C drive, and at the same time copy another 10gb of file to D drive, and record the time.
Compare the difference

If you're cutting lets say 1 000 000 1KB files from one location on the hdd to another location to the hdd compared to copying to another patition, the difference is about 10000000% difference.
Cutting on the same partiton takes a couple seconds.
Cutting to another partion might take you couple hours to even a day if you have slow hdd.
This huge difference is due to different method of moving the files.

 

1.) yes those dips are from disk use it does lower the score by a noticeable amount but somebody in the know like me or you knows to look at the graph and take those out and not use the bench numbers.

2.) your right C: & D: will have different speeds as one is on a different part of the hdd platter. Well depending on where your partition falls, but access time seems to be almost unhindered. I think there is a lot of random varibles here that have to do with the hdd your using, and where those partitions fall, in my case all my hdd have dual platters so its very possible if I split my partitions in two each one has its own platter.

Still despite your great logic and explanation you never gave me the proof I was asking for and I already have test I have run during my reviews that show my statement to be true, so you have done nothing to convince me.

I think we both are right but there is an unknown middle ground with those unknown variables I was talking about.

 

partitioning changes the speed "layout" of a disk.

say you have the os in the fast part, and the data in the slow part. as long as you only use the os, or only the data, you're quite fast, faster than without partitioning maybe (as you have smaller worst-case head-latency due to smaller movements).

but the moment you access both your system and your data, you've lost. then, your disk head has to jump around for each access, resulting in the average latency to be really high (always f.e. half the disk size).

on a one-partition solution, your word files could be placed directly beside word.exe and all it's dlls. so using word will be at highest performance possible, including actually accessing your word-related data. in a 2 partition case, this is not possible, resulting in a possible slowdown.

so all it does, is change the performance behaviour. sometimes faster, sometimes slower. but in general, mostly placebo-effekt. in the end, it proves that partitioning is not for performance, except if you reduce the actual data you can store on the disk (say a 2tb disk reduced to 20gb results in a quite high performing disk with low max latency).

partitioning ist mostly about placebo effects anyways. placebo savety, placebo speed gains.

if your os is messed up, you can put in your boot disk and repair the masterbootrecord and such, and it will work again (if it does not repair that by itself like vista does most of the time).

if it doesn't, you can reinstall the os over it to get to your data.

and all in all, the chance for a failing disk is much higher => you need to have real backup solutions.

if you want performance => get an ssd

if you want savety => get an external backup solution like windows home server, or what ever (but something that works automatically, that's important, because you will be lazy one day).

if you want placebo-effects to show your computer knowledge that isn't, do partitions. they're cool. you can show how many virtual drives you have, and how you know how you can order them, instead of using the default folders that work perfectly well.

 

A dual platter drive access data the same way as a single platter drive does. All of them starts the 1st track from the middle then out. The middle of the total tracks doesn't mean on the edge of the 1st track. If it was like that, then on HDtune, you'll see a up down, up down graph instead of the steady decreasing rate graph. So partitioning the drive exactly half way would not achieve the drive performance you're looking for.

I'll upload a small benchmark tool for you to test out each separate partition throughtput to prove it to yourself.

As a general tip, always defragment and optimize your hdd. I do it 24/7 when my computer id idle with diskeeper and it keeeps my disk performance up and fragmentation low.

If you want extreme performance, get acard ans9010. It owns the best SSD, even intel ones any day.

 

Ok i'll run some tests when I get the time and post back.

Currently none of my drives have any partitions on them, as my laptop has dual hdd's I just have them as one partition each.

Same for my desktop it has 3 HDD's each one partition. I would only use a partition normally if I had just one drive.

 

obviously, having more than one disk is much better, performance wise. and savety wise. but simulating the same structure on one-disk systems have no such gains, as stated before..

then again, a raid0 would have even more gain in performance in general, and an ssd would be even better (and then a raid0 of ssd's, then you're at my pc config ).

 

I had raid 0 on the last laptop, it didnt seem too much faster to me (and this agree's with my research on raid 0 being more of a placebo effect than real life gains)

I really onlly did raid 0 for the sake of testing & review and figured it would help me in video editing if anything, but the notebook itself was not fast enough for me to want to edit on it.

My new one with a quad core is fast enough but I decided to leave it as independent drives for safety and because they feel fast enough to me.

2x 320gb 7200rpm seagates are in here, the last one was 2x 250gb 5400rpm western digital.

Everything loads fast for me and as long as I see all 4 cores at 100% when encoding a video I know my HDD is not holding me back. I have not actually tested a video encode yet though.

 

well, you know the ssd rule: as long as you haven't used one you don't know how slow your own system is. and once you've used one, stepping back is impossible

but yes, a raid0 on hdd's doesn't give you that much performance. for ssd's, it's not only measurable, but visible, too. then again, for ssd's, it isn't the same security loss as well. and the backup makes all possible losses once a year unimportant anyways.

but it's fun, if you state "it's fast enough" even while you could measure more performance, then it's fun how you actually care about partitions. as living without partitions is definitely fast enough, too. the difference is just as placebo as it isn't, means sometimes you gain, sometimes you lose. if you focus only on the gains, you can see them, but in the end, they are not the whole thing.. and all in all, there isn't real gain.

 

Imagine having RAID 0 of 4 acard ans9010 with 32 GB of ddr2 ram in each. Once you used it, you won't be able to go back to SSD again.
-lower access time
-300MB/s guarenteed throughtput (limited by SATA controller) and viritually 0 access time.

 

i have: virtually 0 access time, and 200MB/s mostly guaranteed troughput. so while yes, it would be quite faster. it still is not that much improvement in most cases. apps start <1 sec for most. the biggest gain would be ableton live, which currently takes quite a bit to start and then would be mostly instant.

but instead of this, we can go much higher than an sata controller anyways. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs&fmt=22

not much of a problem. 300MB/s is not my next target. 0.5gb or 1gb is.

 

It never really is a bad idea to use partitions in order to store your important files in case you need to format the OS contaminated partition.