partition strategy?

Hi,
I got a 250 Gb HD, and I'd like to be recommended of a good partition strategy.
I was thinking: 25 G for WinXp and applications. 115 G for documents and general storage data (like pictures, software installers, movies), 40 G for games, 60 G for back up.
What do you think?
Recommendations?
Thanks.

 

I think you'd want to up the amount of GB for games. 40 GB is not going to store a lot of gaming data. Another option is to purchase an external hard drive as a backup device. Then you can devote more space to the internal hard disk.

 

I'd say about 25G for XP and the rest for docs, storage, games, movies etc. As if you create a partition for games like on the 5th partition, it'll be on the slow part of the HDD.

Better to have 2 partitions, the most important is to have the OS on one separate.

 

I would take 30% of the whole HDD, that'll be 70GB, and use it as the 1^st partition to install the OS, games and keep the frequently used documents.
Then make the 2^nd partition for the occasionally used documents, and in the end, the 3^rd partition for the backup, which will be rarely used.

Remember, the 1^st partition you make on a RAW HDD, will be on the outermost tracks of the HDD, where the transfer and seek times are the best, so your system will be more responsive if the OS is on the first partition. The performance decreases as you make more partitions and the data is stored on the inner tracks of the platter.

 

some software may not work well if its installed under different HDD volume or partition. keep the installed program on the same disk as you OS, C:\program files\

backing up on the same HDD doesnt make sense (if that one drive fail, there goes your entire data), get seperate harddrive or even better; an external harddrive for backup.

is this laptop or desktop, are you able to get another HDD? i personally dont like the hassle of partitioning, if are only able to have 1hdd and want to get the most performance for your pc, then...

make 2 partitions

[1] for Windows along with Program files etc. etc. if you using iTunes and tick the "keep my music files and folders organize" you want to put your music here.

[2] put all your other data in here, basically put your my document here, name it like; "your_name documents" under that "your_name musics" "your_name pictures" "your_name videos" etc, also, put your download folder here.

this is done to reduce fragmentation.

also, if you are a bit adventurous,

create a third partition

[3] select this volume as your virtual memmory (page files) dump volume.

i havent try this, and personally dont think its worth the trouble.

 

Making a 3rd partition for page file or such isn't worth it as that will be accessed on the slowest part of the HDD and will only make it worse

 

Well, I still think it is a good idea to have a back up within the same HD. My experience is that external HD break much easily than internal, cause you move them around a lot more. On the other hand, sometimes you can just get a corrupt MFT that keeps you from booting only on the OS partition (as someone else said).

 

I split mine up in 3 partitions.

First partition is the fastest... T: drive, for caches, Temp folder, page file, frequently written, accessed and deleted items. I give about 8GB for that

second is the C: drive for OS and apps. - only about 13.7GB, small allocation units for efficiency

third is D: drive. Has special folders like Desktop, mydocs and other spacehogs... it's a nice 211GB chunk

Been running this for over a year with minimal thrashing and fragmenting.. pretty rock solid actually. The purpose is to confine frequent accesses to the fastest portion of the disk. The C: drive is still in the speedy part of the disk and appropriately data in this partition doesnt change much. And D: is in the slowest part of the drive where big data just sits and is rarely accessed.