Where is that 'partitioning for performance' thread?

A few months back I saw a thread that was huge. It explained how one was to partition their HDD for performance. Install the OS on the fastest HDD, games on the second fastest and everything else on the third fastest etc.

It was extremely detailed and very confusing but I would like to know where it is if anyone can remember what it was called. Sorry that I have no idea where to post this kind of thread and thanks in advance.

 

Hmmmm very interesting what you mean there...but I searched for it no result

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/hardware-components-aftermarket-upgrades/442289-partitioning-performance-hitachi-7k500-benchmark-setup-specifics-2.html this one?

 

Yep, that is the one, although read carefully, there are 5 partitions listed, but one of those holds the boot file and is created by default when installing windows and the last one is completely optional.

 

having 5 partitions on a 500GB drive is at least 2 partitions too many

 

says who?


IMO short stroking a HDD is one of the easiest options for speeding it up...

 

zero partitions, and let a good defragmentation tool optimize the FILES for the fast access. same features, no losses due to the fixed boundaries that partitions give.

partitions are not magic, they're just virtual walls you put onto your storage to artifically limit where your files can be. you could, instead, just have the files at the same places without any wall. same gains, no stupid walls in your way.

not that i care, as if i would want performance, i'd just get an ssd. nothing else comes close, anyways.

 

^That. And also, Windows 7 uses a system to where when it writes to disk, it tries to group the writes together anyway so they're no all over the disk. I guess you could call it preemptive defragmenting. Of course, it also has a background defragmenting service that runs every once in a while by itself too.

Personally, the difference between a fully defragmented platter based drive and when Windows manages it itself is negligible. Especially when you could get SO SO SO much more performance out of an SSD.

 

jup. word documents are close to word.exe, which is close to all the dlls it requires. etc.

that's all built in. maybe not 100% perfect, but good enough to make results pretty negitible.

especially compared to an ssd.

 

on this i'm pretty sure some of the default scheduled tasks that run help with this and i goofed and accidentally told them all not to run...doh

but on the partitioning i used to do the multiple partitions for speed etc but lately i've gone back to single partition drives

 

Here's an article explaining what I was talking about... if anyone wants to educate themselves.

Disk Defragmentation ? Background and Engineering the Windows 7 Improvements - Engineering Windows 7 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

 

dont be fooled, you cant speed up your HDD unless you actually increase it's rotational speed and verify that the head can run without too many errors that would compromise the increased speed.

once you start cross read/write form partition to partition, you've already lost all the minor advantages that you supposedly gained when partitioning the drive. The rest is shortening your space big time to gain tiny speed increase here and there.

P.S. ... says me.

 

Well, it won't increase the max speed of the HDD that is for sure, but it will help keep some critical stuff where data access times are a bit faster. A HDD remains a HDD though, personally, i don't find this worth the effort, but opinions differ. If you feel like doing it, might as well do it.

 

All the documentation I've seen says the Windows defrag tools tend to move critical or often used files (regardless of type) to the outside edge. Reason being as the diameter grows as you move away from the center, the radius grows, thus more distance can be covered in a disk revolution than files contained on the inside with a smaller radius.

I've never heard of something that will place all *.doc files in proximity to word.exe. In fact, this would end up being a performance killer. No reason to move *.doc, *.pdf, *.mp3, files closer to the files that run them to the outer edge, especially if that file was only used once.

I'd like to know the reasoning here. Do you have a link for this?

The angular speed is constant, but due to the larger radius, more distance (thus file data) can be covered over the same amount of time.

from Platter Diameter

With that said, I agree with tijo, the headaches of running out of space on a particular partition (or the hassle of resizing partitions when you do), are not really worth the time. However, to someone like tiller, perhaps he doesn't have a problem with that, and kudos if he can eek that much more performance from platter based HDDs.