Split/Mirrored? Samsung laptop hard drive

[matspart3]

Bear with me, I know very little about IT...

I have a 3 year old Samsung R20 laptop. When I first turned the thing on and set it up, I have a vague recollection of it suggesting I 'split' the hard drive to act as some sort of mirror back-up if it all went pear shaped. Sounded like a good idea at the time.

3 years on, I have a 'C' drive with about 5GB of it's 30GB space left and a 'D' drive which is completely empty...and a laptop that does everything painfully s l o w l y. Is there an easy way to merge the two? Should I bother?

TIA

[idle stop]

You could try putting all your data files (Word, Excel etc) (drag and drop them) on the D Drive, though probably this won't save enough space.
If you right click on My Computer and choose the Clean Up Disk (or something like it) option, this may help slim down the C drive too.
Have you loads of junk programs? Look in Control Panel and the Add/Remove Software option to clean up anything you don't need or haven't used.
You can get disk management software (often on a freebee CD with a computer magazine that may enable you to merge or re-size the partitions....but do a back-up first.
If all else fails, you could save your data, re-format the disk, and re-install Windows and Office, etc. Check to see if your Samsung has 'Samsung Recovery Solution' in the programmes folder: this may simplify this process. And finally, if considering the last option, you migh think of upgrading the hard disk to a bigger one: they're pretty cheap, and all you generally need to do is unscrew a cover on back of laptop, plug out the old HD and plug in the new, replace cover.
I assume you've also got updated anti-virus etc software: bugs can also slow things down.
Hope this helps.

[Bushfiva]

There are several tools that will join drives like that together. For example, Easeus has a free one. You'd probably use the tool to delete D, and then expand C to fill the now-available space.

You could also simply start saving your data to D. Since D is empty, it doesn't sound like anything's been backed up anywhere so far.

Was this an 80GB machine when you bought it? Samsung may have also put a hidden rescue partition on the drive (which would show up in Easeus and similar tools). You'd want to leave that one alone. Are you aware of any items of software running that might be doing any kind of backup in the background? I know nothing about Samsung, but IF it's an 80GB drive and IF you split your user-accessible drives 50-50 THEN there's 20GB hiding somewhere, which would be unusually large for a simple rescue partition.

Depending on your comfort level, you may want to simply consider the first paragraph and decide whether it's something you'd like to try.

[Mike-Bracknell]

3 years on, it's almost obsolete anyway. Why not treat yourself to a new one and avoid the impending doom of component failure :)

[Keef]

Depressing, aren't they!

The best idea is to keep all the software on Drive C, but to move all the data to Drive D.

The tricky bit, if you've let Windows have its head, is to find where it's put your stuff so that you can move it.

[AnthonyGA]

Defragment the C: drive; fragmentation may slow the drive down if it doesn't have a lot of free space (this is much more true if you have it formatted as FAT than if you have it formatted as NTFS). The defragmentation gadget (right-click on the drive in Explorer, then Properties | Tools | Defragment Now) will tell you if defragmentation is really needed or not. This built-in defragmentation tool is not the fastest or the fanciest, but it's safe.

Do not put programs on one drive and data on the other. If the drives were two physically independent disks, that would be a good idea, but when they are actually the same physical disk, it's a bad idea, as it will hugely increase access times. You can put programs with their data on the second drive, but don't put a program on C: with its data on D:. Data that isn't constantly accessed (such as a Word document) can be put on D:, but databases and the like must stay on the same drive as their programs when both drives are physically one.

A slowdown on the machine, if it hasn't been slow before, could be fragmentation ... or it could be malware infection.

[Shunter]

it will hugely increase access times

I disagree. A single disc split into 2 partitions would perform just as quickly as a disc with a single partition in most circumstances except that you have some level of flexibility (or inflexibility depending on your perspective). The disc head will have to move just the same distances as it would with a single partition. The kernel filesystem driver overhead associated with flipping between partitions is tiny to non-existent.

In either circumstance if you keep all your data within your user profile (like all good users should) it makes little difference from a recovery perspective when both partitions are on the same disc. Everything being in the same place is more important than it simply being on a different partition. If you have 2 drives then it's a somewhat different story.

[Mike-Bracknell]

Depressing, aren't they!

Depressing I may be, but a laptop with 5Gb free that's painfully slow is NOT going to get any quicker simply by mucking around with the hard drive partitioning.

The only related issue would be disk fragmentation, and I'd expect the OP to be complaining about a massive amount of disk thrashing occurring during mild use if that were much of an issue.

(although to eliminate it from your enquiries a quick defrag would help).

So, it's onto either troubleshooting what's slowing it down (which is most probably 3 years worth of crap that's been installed on it), or biting the bullet and going directly to the store and buying something that's inherently several times faster and running the latest software :ok:

(TCO isn't just about business computers y'know!)

[Loose rivets]

Piriform CCookie Cleaner fixed my pal's computer without doing anything else. It had so many cookies that it took CC about 4 mins to erase them!

[Keef]

I use a 5 year old laptop that is just fine. It has a new(ish) 80GB hard drive (not partitioned) and 2GB of memory. There is no need to replace it.

It did get quite slow a couple of years back when the smaller original hard drive was getting full. Doubling the drive size and four times the RAM performed wonders on it.

[Saab Dastard]

It could be that the page file has become fragmented. That can slow things down appreciably.

A quick check to see if that's a contributing factor would be to remove the page file from C and put it on D. I tend to create a fixed page file with a size that is twice the physical RAM, rather than leave it as system managed.

SD

[Mike-Bracknell]

It could be that the page file has become fragmented. That can slow things down appreciably.

A quick check to see if that's a contributing factor would be to remove the page file from C and put it on D. I tend to create a fixed page file with a size that is twice the physical RAM, rather than leave it as system managed.


I used to do similar and fix the page file size to the "Recommended" size rather than have Windows manage it, as the recommendation from Microsoft was that it'd never use more than the recommended size and a dynamically varying pagefile would promote the fragmentation of your hard drive.

Now though, after spending the last couple of days poring over page file documents for Server 2008, I can safely say that the left hand of Microsoft doesn't always know what the right hand is doing, and that you need to check the page commit figures and total up a bunch of memory figures before you know roughly what's best for it......and even then MS throws a curveball.

/offtopic but interesting.