How do you partition your hard drives ?

[Lost_luggage34]

Just carrying out the 6 monthly reinstallation of Windows and was wondering what others do with their hard drives.

I have a Maxtor 120Gb drive with 8Mb cache - so relatively quick.

Usually I allocate about 6Gb to the OS on a C: partition, then install applications on the D: partition which is on the same drive.

Data is generally stored on another, slower drive on a different IDE channel and backed up externally.

So 46Gb on the fast drive is allocated - suggestions welcome for best use.

The primary IDE channel also has a CDRW drive.

SATA is an option which will be visited later in the year.

[maxell]

C drive 54.5 gb NTFS op system plus main programs NTFS because its used for DVD conversions
D drive 50gb Fat 32 photo's plus Mp3
E drive 10.4gb Fat32 used to store drivers etc.
F DVD-Rw
G CD-RW
H DVD-rom
I Virtual drive
J 400GB Network Drive used to store things! plus backup to other drives plus an image of C drive
Max

[shuttlebus]

You would be well advised to remove the CDRW from the primary channel and pop it on to the secondary. CD/DVD drives only transfer data at a max (from memory) bus speed of 15.5 Mbytes/second, which is the original IDE limit (even 52 times 150k/sec is less than 15.5Mb/sec)

Hard drives operate (depending on Motherboard) at 33, 66, 100 or 133 Mb/sec (and it could be higher although I seem to remember that parallel IDE peaked at 133).

Therefore, you are effectively limiting your primary channel to 15.5Mbyte/sec by attaching the CDRW.

Best to hang the hard drives off the primary channel and the optical(s) off the secondary.

Regards,

Shuttlebus

[Lost_luggage34]

Thanks for that Shuttlebus - funnily enough I have just done that whilst cleaning out the fans.

[Conan the Librarian]

6Mb for the C drive? Is this a laptop? By the time you have added perennial favourites like Adobe Reader and all the other crud that infests all of us, (just thrill at those temp files) I would say 20GB gives a bit of elbow room, but not much. After 12 months, C drive is a jumbled mass of... err... things. If you are going to do the reinstall every 6 months, then you are either a masochist, or seriously short of space on your C drive.

One day, I will start a thread to see who has the most unwelcome, uninvited, intrusive, nasty, useless, unpleasant, waste of time items in their start up list.

Honestly, give yourself some space, because however rigorous you are, C drive will fill up like a toddlers nappy.

Conan

[Saab Dastard]

I agree with Conan totally on this!

C: has to cope with all the program files, system files and user settings (email, My this and My that) as well as all the browser cache and other temp stuff.

It is often possible to push some of this onto another drive (e.g. on installing a new application), but the default is always to C:

BTW - if you are getting short of space on C: it is often helpful to move the swap/page file to a larger drive. Also use compression on C: - e.g. program files.

But anything less than 10GB is futile, less than 20GB a pain!

I have an older PC running XP with a 10GB disk as C: and a 40GB as D: and it is barely coping, with C: about 80% full - and that's with all my tricks employed!

SD

[The Nr Fairy]

Moving the swap file to its own partition helps with performance as it doesn't get fragmented.

I set up a requisite size partition, then set the page file size to stay the same size, not change all the time.

Don't forget to de-configure the original one on the C: drive.

[Saab Dastard]

Moving the swap file to its own partition helps with performance as it doesn't get fragmented

Actually it doesn't. Unless you purge the page file, it can get fragmented with time. There are a couple of ways of ensuring that the pagefile doesn't get fragmented, the easiest being to purge it on shutdown - which significantly increases shut-down time, but has the added benefit of not leaving sensitive information vulnerable to others. And yes, I have worked in restricted (and above) security environments where this is mandated.

[shuttlebus]

Sorry guys, disagree.

6Gb C drive is sufficient. Install all your programs on say D drive and then create another partition (E drive) for data.

Then use TweakUI to move a number of "special folders" on to your data drive.

I have moved My Docs, Favourites, and all my e-mail to the data drive. Tweak will also let you move things like your desktop etc. You then have it all in one place in an easy to back up location that can be FAT formatted and easliy recovered under dos. Win2k/XP etc can then run in NTFS, rather than Fat32 and if windows goes pop, you can format and re-install without losing your data!

Of course, you all have a robust backup system in place, don't you? So this isn't necessary is it?

[Mac the Knife]

Originally Posted by shuttlebus

<blah, blah> Therefore, you are effectively limiting your primary channel to 15.5Mbyte/sec by attaching the CDRW.

Most mobos less than 5 years old can handle the different data rates and won't slow down the HDD.

Moving the swap file to another drive or partition won't affect speed or fragmentation, but it's a good idea to limit the size. If you're worried about fragmentation then run SysInternals free PageDefrag once a month - http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/PageDefrag.html

I always put the OS and apps on one partition (preferably drive) while data lives on another partition (preferably drive). NTFS is more robust than FAT32 and much more secure. Even some modern apps expect to be on C:\Program Files even though they say you can install them elsewhere. Data is mirrored to a Linux machine on the network. Odds & ends and copies of all the drivers live on a FAT32 drive. Backup and drive imaging is another story.

As shuttlebus says, it's a good idea to move most of those special folders to your data drive.

6GB is a bit small for the Windows OS what with all the crap MS installs.