partitioning in layman's term?

good day computer experts, can you pls lecture me about partitioning in laymans term, the benefits of it, and is it really good to partition? i have a 320gig hdd

thanks in advance!!!

 

Say you have a box. You throw everything in the box. That's an unpartitioned drive. If you want to find something, you have to dig through the whole box. You can reorganize the stuff (defragment) to keep things together, but it's still one big box of stuff.

Now take your box, and put two smaller boxes (partitions) inside. One is about a third the size of the big box, the other is two thirds. Now you can put everything you need every day in the smallest box (like your OS and programs) and then put everything you only need sometimes (documents, photos, media) in the other box. The smallest box is in front, so it's faster to get to. You need to reorganize it more often, but it takes less time since its smaller. The box with your documents does not need to be reorganized as often, because it does not change much. It is slower to get stuff out of because it is farther from the front, but it does not have things you get out all the time anyway.

Let's say that your box gets really messed up (or you get bored) and you need to reinstall your OS (sorry, couldn't find a good box metaphor for reinstalling your OS..oh, wait, you spilled coffee in it...yeah...let's go with that). In the first case, you have one big box, so everything has to be copied before you empty the box and start over. All of your documents and files as well as your OS. In the second case, you can empty the smaller box that got coffee spilled in it, and reinstall your stuff, but the large box can stay the way it is. You don't need to take everything out (completely reformat the drive) to reinstall on one partition.

OK, my analogy sucks, but hopefully that helps. By having partitions, you keep the frequently accessed stuff on the fastest part of the drive, and less used stuff on the slower portion. You also have all of your documents on a second partition intact if you need to reinstall the OS, since it is on a separate partition.

 

wow i get it!

so with 320 gig, i want to have a partition for games, movies and music, and one for the OS (i heard that windows vista takes up 20 gig?) and documents and files? is that good? how much memory do you suggest i partition for the 2?

thanks in advance

 

Give Vista at least 30-40GB if you must partition it.. Are you going to leave 'Program Files' on Partition 1?

 

hmmm i dont know sir, what can you suggest must i do? i want games, movies music and pics on one partition, and the other partition for the windows vista, word documents, powerpoint files...

addendum:
when i partition my laptop like that, will it have benefits on my gaming speed? or when multitasking with microsoft office stuff?

 

No difference for multitasking or gaming speed.

 

There is a set of stuff that should never leave your OS partition, that is: Windows, Document and Settings (or Users), Program Files and if applicable Program Files (x86), These folders should always remain on your OS partition, which should be your "C" Drive. Its not an absolute must, but its a common practice. You aren't going to receive any real benefits from partition aside from an organizational perspective, or incase you need to format only one partition in particular.

My Recommendation for Partitioning a 320GB, if thats all that is in your computer would be

C:\ 80GB
D:\ 80GB
E:\ 160GB

in this 3-way scheme, You have ample space for Windows, and Stuff you have put on your C drive, random stuff like whats on your desktop, your pagefile (which you can move) and other things can add up, and for your programs there in your program files

D: can be filled with all your music, all your documents, photos videos, all that media entertainment stuff you have, and you can send your downloads here too

E: dedicated to games, and nothing but games, if your a gamer like me, 160GB is not nearly enough for all your games, but its a good scheme for a 320GB harddrive, here you can put your games.

Of course this is just my reccomendation, if you aren't a gamer per say, you could make the extra 80GB toward your D or C drive

 

i am a gamer sir... and i think i get it already, and il think il do what you suggest, but il make the game partition bigger and the documents smaller to maybe about 30gig?
next to learn is how to partition, what to use, and do's and dont's

 

Personally, I believe that a Linux live CD like PartedMagic (Partition Editor Magic) and Gparted (Gnome Partition Editor) is the way to go for any major partitioning. The Windows tool before OS installs sucks really badly and Disk Utility isn't great either (I learned that the hard way; 70GB of music, 40GB of video, and a few games, all gone).

You'll have to either figure out a way to shrink your current Windows partition down (hard, time-consuming way) or just back up your important documents and data and format your entire hard drive (much easier way).

In the partition editor, it will give you a listing of all of your partitions and how large they are. Most likely, you will have one or two partitions on your hard drive from the factory; one is your main system partition (you probably know it as C and possibly a 10GB recovery partition, depending on who made your computer. Both of those will have to be deleted after all of your data has been backed up.

After the partitions are deleted, you will have a clean slate to work with. Right now is the place to decide whether or not you would like to dual boot, or just make 3 NTFS(the filesystem that Windows uses) partitions for your system, documents, and games. Normally, the values here are listed in MB, so size your partitions accordingly.

After you have decided what sizes you want, you will have to apply all of the changes for them to take place.

Hopefully you had an OS disk ship with your computer or have a copy of what you want to install. Now just pop the disc in and install the OS. Once you get to the hard drive selection page, be sure to select the whichever 80GB partition you placed first in the partition editor. Supposedly, this helps speed, but I have never seen too huge of a difference either way.

Now just finish the install process and you're done.

 

Very well explained all of you! I was also a little confused about partitioning and now I understand it quite well.

 

Some games don't work if not installed in the windows partition

 

Since everyone here is pro partitioning, here's the point of view from someone who isn't. Sticking with the box analogy.

If you have one big box, you can fill it up any way you want. You want to have 30... units... of programs and 200 of documents? No problem. You want to change that down the road to be 200 units of programs and 30 of documents? Also no problem. You can still organize by using folders... in the box... so partitions DON'T really help you organize. Anyone can organize any way they want, some prefer partitions as their method of organization, but understand - you can be organized without partitions.


Now, if you partition that box, and now you have 2 boxes, you're limited to what each box can contain. Usually when I see people with partitions, I see one completely filled and the other maybe half filled. This is because what you store is dynamic. Say you set box 1 to be for os/programs and be 50 units. Then you set box 2 for documents, and make it 150 units. Well, if you want to install more than 50 units of programs, you've got a problem. Yes, you could always resize that box and take some space from the other box, but this would be just as much work as getting data out of a single broken box, so what's the point?

 

No, it didn't suck--though it was unscientific. However, perfect in a generally descriptive manner as I believe was what the OP asked for. Very good!

 

There are benefits and disadvantages to partitioning. Games write registry entries when they install so you cant move them from partition to partition or 'box to box' and have them work. They may work, but there is a chance they will not. So if you do choose to partition, make sure you allocate enough room on each hard drive appropriately.

 

I did get a bit confusing using the word "organize" when I was trying to get at the concept of defragmenting. What I was trying to say is that if you have the OS and and programs on their own partition, that partition will need to be defragged regularly as things get moved around, but the partitions holding media and less commonly used documents will not need to be deragged as often since there is less movement of files on that partition.

 

Vista automatically defrags your drives when you're idling, so I think it's kind of a null point in Vista and up. I guess it saves you a little time in XP, but still not worth the hassle IMHO.

 

I use partitions as data security tools. I do a lot of OS experimentation, so I need to keep some data on a large, data-only partition in order to avoid losing all of it whenever I want to install a new OS.

Also, it helps to have a data partition that's formatted in NTFS when you have a Windows install along with a Linux or OS X install. Windows cannot read from HFS+ or EXT2/EXT3 partitions, but Linux and OS X have drivers that can enable read/write to NTFS partitions.