Is partition of hardisk required for perfomance?

Im using a DELL STUDIO 1435 with 250GB HDD ,core2duo 2GHZ and ddr2 2GB ram....
im going to install a WIN7 Ultiumate x64 im going to have a clean install..(ill keep dell hidden partation)....is it required to keep seprate partaion for WIN7 and other file....which give more...optmization..it the case of perfomance...??????????

 

A single huge partition should give you the best overall performance. Since windows Vista, windows will defrag the hdd by itself thus fragmentation will not be a problem. If you don't want a backup partition on the drive to store backup things, or if you have an external hdd for that purpose, i would suggest single partition for the OS.

 

ok............but i heard that if we keep single partition it will effect boot time?

 

Where did you hear this nonsense?

 

Partitioning won't have much effect on performance.

 

I haven't used partitions since back in the '90s. Both my desktop and the wife's use a single partition on a 1TB drive for everything, with no noticeable loss of performance. If you think about it, it actually gives you "more" space, at least on smaller drives, as if you're stuck with two partitions with 20 gb left on each, and want to download a 30gb torrent, you're out of luck. If you only had one partition, you'd have 40 gb free all in one place, and it wouldn't be a problem.

For backups, I'd use a second physical drive and NOT another partition on the same one. Think about it - if the drive fails, the fact that you have your data backed up on the same drive isn't going to help you.

 

With the addition of new physical storage like external HDDs and stuff, additional partitions IMO aren't as useful unless you're multi-booting.

I mean, you can separate your data by partition if you want but that can be accomplished through folders too.

As stated before, performance gains are marginal at best and not very useful for most people.

 

Partitioning isn't for performance. You partition your hd so that your files are more organized. I have 4 partitions in my hd. I have 3 OS and each OS has their own partition. The 4th partition is for keeping all my data, downloaded files and all other files that I want to back up. In case I need to reinstall my OS, I just reformat the partition that contains the OS and keep the other partitions intact. Under such circumstances, it is far easier to reinstall the OS than if I had everything resides in just one partition.

 

I wouldn't say partitioning provides an organized file structure. It's personal preference. Also if you re-install the OS, you need to re-map all your personal folders to the data partition again.

 

I should have said reinstall from the image backup that contains the OS, not reinstall from scratch. If you reinstall from the last good image backup, all your preferences should stay unless you change it since the last backup.

 

There's a lot of good discussion in this thread regarding partitioning of a hard drive and its effects on performance:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=442289&page=3

 

Well, partitioning CAN make a difference, for instance on Linux systems you can put /usr on a separate partition or drive for easier backup, swap (that's like Windows' page file) usually goes onto a separate partition to keep fragmentation at a minimum.

Source: Gentoo Handbook ( http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?chap=4&part=1#doc_chap2_sect2 )​

But this is an advanced topic, and it's okay to not care about this unless your machine's performance automagically degrades a lot over time.


On Windows machines, it's better to keep the page file on C: for various reasons, one of them being possible performance impacts unless you put the page file on a separate disk. So since you don't seem to have special requirements and just want your partitioning to be performace-centric, I'd say you should go with a single partition in this case.

By the way, the Dell partition contains the Dell diagnostic tools. Dell's diagnostic tools can always be obtained via Dell's website should you one day wish to remove that partition, though it's usually recommended to leave the Dell diagnostic partition alone.


Christoph

EDIT: Ah well, didn't see there was a second page on this thread...

 

and you think that takes longer than finding all you non-os data on the primary partition, archiving it off, re-installing the os, then recovering your personal stuff?
the re-map part is not much more than re-assigning the same drive letter.

 

I didn't say anywhere in my post that re-mapping the personal folders takes less time than recovering personal data. Again it's personal preference.