HDD and partitions ?

Hey all... I've currently have a 200 GB HDD sitting in my T61. Right now the HDD is just one big partition using all the capacity.

I've heard that it's a good idea to make one partition for the Windows installation and program files on approx. 80 GB. That will make Windows run a bit faster regarding boot time and general system speed because all the system files will be at the outer edge of the platters ? Or doesn't it have any effect at all ?

Regards,
Jakob Laursen

 

Today, with high speed drives and controllers, you won't notice much of a speed increase. The main use for partitions is having a safe place to put documents - if you must reinstall the operating system, those files won't be erased, and to allow multiple operating systems to be installed on the same drive.

 

Performance won't be any different, but it is nice to have your OS and programs on one partition, or just the OS, and the rest on another so that you can nuke the OS and not have to worry about moving your files.

 

Well, I did something like that. With magnetic hard drives, the beginning of the drive is almost twice as fast as the end of the drive. (Look at an HD Tune graph to see this.) So, moving frequently-accessed files to the beginning of the drive can help. One way to do that is with partitioning as you describe, and that's the solution I used.

There may be other ways to accomplish that. For example, if you install the OS first, it'll probably install at the beginning of the drive and tend to stay there. Also, some defrag programs have optimizers that purport to move frequently-used files to the beginning of the drive. Exactly how well they work, I have no idea.

Also, how much data do you have? The performance decline over the length of the drive is not linear, and it's mostly in the second half. So the performance at the midpoint (100 gb point in your case) will probably not be too much worse than at the beginning. So if you only have, say, 70 gb of data, then I wouldn't bother. Windows' built-in defrag should push the files toward the beginning of the drive without partitions.

btw I disagree with kegobeer's saying that it won't matter. Hard drives are the biggest bottleneck in everyday performance in laptops... so a modest improvement in disk speed can make a difference. It's true though, that your OS will run fine without any partitioning or file placement optimization.

 

For a 200GB drive, you'll get about 186GB. So you can make a 60GB partition (for the OS and frequently accessed files), and a 126GB partition (for dumping stuff).
You won't notice much difference when running synthetic benchmarks, because they stress and benchmark the whole disk, though the boost in real-world application loading times will be significant.

This video will help you understand the Seeking operation of a HDD. If the data is on the outer edge, the actuator arm will have to cover a smaller section of tracks on the disk/s. Hence better seek times and faster loading. The actuator arm/head will take alot more time to fetch the data from the inner edge of the HDD.

Normally, the first partition made on a new HDD with unallocated space is on the outer edge. So, you can try shrinking the existing partition (which should shrink to the outer edge of the disks), and then make a new partition which should be on the inner edge of the disks.

(Or wipe the drive clean, delete all the partitions and make new partitions all over again. )