I will soon purchase a WD 60mg 7200rpm hardrive. I just wonder if anyone knows any advantages/disadvantages of partionning hardrives TIA Cheers!! p.s. : I don't use RAID
Depends on your file system of choice. If your using a Windows Op Sys: Win NT, 2000, XP = NTFS Win95, 98 = FAT32 FAT32 disk usage efficieny can be improved by partitioning - when you partition the drive you lower the size of the clusters. Clusters are the smallest area on the drive you can access. On a 60G HD, FAT32 ould result in a cluster size around 16K. That means that every file smaller then 16K will take up 16K on the drive. Open Notepad, type one letter, save it = 16K used. Whether or not this is a huge deal is up to you. My instructor prefers to keep FAT32 partitions around 15G max due to this. NTFS manages disks much better - partitioning such a system is purely decided by your preference / needs. In my case, a recent change from multiple partitions/FAT32/ Win98 to Win2K/NTFS/1 partition (because of Wealth-Lab) resulted in a much happier user A site with info: http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/tech/storage/ntfs-preinstall.asp "www.microsoft.com/hwdev/tech/storage/ntfs-preinstall.asp" Smitty
Thanks guys! I'm presently using Win98 SE, and soon to upgrade to Win 2K or XP (home/pro?). The reason for my question was that I wonder if it's useful to have Windows OS installed in a small partition of a large hardrive, and have different softwares installed in different other partitions, so that I could choose to 'share' different partitions for security purpose, e.g. TWS and E Signal would be in one partition, and I do not share this 'partition' with the 'network'. ... you know, in one hardrive, having some porn mpg next to TWS and Esignal.... feel a bit ... dirty...
Even with only one OS, I personally like to use a few partitions. One for the OS, one for program files and one for personal data. That way every so often when I reinstall the OS (to clean things up), everything else is in tact. Just format the OS (C) drive do a fresh install of the OS then reinstall all your software. All programs use their previous settings because the program files were left in tact. Also, very easy to backup the drive with the stuff that matters. In W2K or XP, the TweakUI program allows you to very easily change the My Documents folder (and others), to a location on the other drive. As oppsed to in the user profile.
As a general rule, if you're using W2K or XP and an NTFS disk format - there's normally little reason to partition the volume. As far as sharing - you can share folders without sharing the whole volume - so no reason to partition for that reason. If you run defragmenting, you're also better off with a single volume because your free space won't get split up across different partitions that would have to be defragged individually.
I agree. I also have the OS on one partition and programs/data on another partition. (Backups are kept on a second removable hard drive with multiple partitions.) Another advantage of a partitioned hard drive is that an image of the boot partition C: can be stored on D:. If the operating system on C: somehow gets corrupted, everything can be restored in minutes using the C: image file on D:. This avoids a possible operating system reinstall. After image restore to C: and reboot, everything is as it was when the C: image was created. Creating an image takes just a few minutes, and it's good practice to include image creation in the regular backup regimen. Both of these handle NTFS partitions in W2K and XP: For drive imaging: http://www.powerquest.com/driveimage/ For drive partitioning: http://www.powerquest.com/partitionmagic/