good thinking :)
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good thinking :)
I don't think it's anal it's just good practice. I'm currently trying to organise and delete all my crap and back up onto an external hard drive. Then I'm gonna do a windows reinstall (18 months old). Is it better to do the 2 drive system as above or Raid 0 like this;
2x 160gb disks
Part 1. 15- 20gb for OS and small applications eg FF,.
Part 2. Games
Part 3 Storage/data
NB: I used to use raid 0 and so I know about the backing up :)
Is it possible, and is there any mileage from taking two disks and making, say, 3 identically sized partitions of each and then making three RAID0 sets, or two RAID0 sets and 2 unraided, or RAID1, data partitions?
Would this theory work on 5400 rpm laptop hard drives ? I was going to reinstall XP on my laptop and I was going to partition it anyway to keep my moves and stuff (which are changed frequently) on one and the OS in the other to reduce fragmentation and stuff. Its only a 120gb hdd.
It would be the same principle.
Very nice thread. Am currently working out what can be sent to an external drive, and (maybe) by the weekend will be ready for a full wipe & re-install. I've been putting it off for 6 months already, as i 've never had a windows OS stay up & running for more than 18 months before and this XP install is about 2 years now, but am getting some random wierdness (icons missing in bottom right etc).
I wonder how fragmentation will affect the speed increase? If the speed increase really is significant in practice, then to keep that speed increase the disk will need frequent defragging.
It is the bottom drawing. The partitions are created from the outer cylinders (vertical tracks on all platters) working inwards, and performance will generally get slower with each partition created - with a marked difference between the first and last. Rule of thumb is that is you want the fastest accross the board performance from the first partition is to make it no more than 28-33% of the total volume size (HD Tune can help determin this). 25% will always be good.
Fragmentation is still an issue and you still need to defrag regularly to maintain perfomance - keeps head seeking down when reading contiguous data and you should arrange tha stuff you want fastest on the outer cylinders when defragging (not possible with built in defrag tools).
Fragmention will still be a problem, it just wont be as much of a chronic problem as it would be with one uber-partition that you get with default windows installs. Instead of defragging every week or whatnot, you can just do it with your regular filesystem cleanups.
Imagine how much fun you could have working out how to create partitions if you had a JBOD array :D
Over on bit-tech forums there is a huge thread about multipartitioning and backups and restores. The instruction were done zapwizard I think. Threads a year or older, but it had all the info on how to edit registry entries to move directories such as program files and my documents to where you wanted them to be etc.
There was also a method for reinstalling just windows within minutes and getting back all the documents as they were etc.
Here's the guide from ZapWizard ... Its based on Win2K, but should apply just fine to XP.
http://www.zapwizard.com/Guides/Partitioning/index.html
Using that in addition to planning the partition order should help us all get cleaner, more responsive systems.
Having a partition only for my downloads would really help I think, because almost nothing else changes on my PC once setup. Very few random program installs (I use Altiris SVS anyway) and not too many new documents and such. I will just have to get used to getting to it through another link than the My Documents and clicking on the folder.