Partitioning advice

[Shooty*]

Morning all,
Just had a 1tb Samsung Spinpoint delivered for my media PC.

Unfortunately, mobo, ram, cpu not arrived yet. On the plus side, this gives me opportunity to think about how I'm going to set the drive up.

It's going to be the only hard drive in there, and I'm guessing I should partition.

I was thinking of splitting it up like this. Would be grateful for any comments

Sizes:
System: 50 gb
Music: 50gb
Photos: 100 gb
Games: 50 gb
Comics 100 gb
TV Shows: 581!

Total: 931.51

My rationale is that my photos get updated very frequently, and are more prone to fragmentation, so I'll keep them on one partition so I can defrag it easily. Games, with save games, profiles, etc, similarly tend to create new files. Music gets added to, so seemed sensible to keep that in one lump, and then that leaves a lot of space for movies.

I've actually got 38 gb music, 65 gb comics, 33gb photos, but am leaving extra space for these to "grow", especially photos when we have a small baby

That's 6 partitions. Is that stupid? Is my reasoning re: keeping similar items grouped together to assist with defragging certain things when necessary, faulty?

Any thoughts gratefully received.

[Barry]

I'd allow at least 100 gig for games concidering games are on avg 5 gig each these days

[DDY]

Here's a tip.

Windows partition manager will only allow 4 partitions, you've got 6 there but not to worry, you can use extended partitions.

Create the initial 50GB needed during the windows installation and leave the rest out until windows is up and running. Use the disk manager (in windows) to create two primary partitions and one extended for the last three remaining, then split the extended partition into three further partitions.

e.g.

Do when installing windows
System: 50 gb - Primary

Once windows has installed
Music: 50gb - Primary
Photos: 100 gb - Primary

Extended partitions
Games: 50 gb
Comics 100 gb
TV Shows: 581!

[Shooty*]

BLimey. OK, thanks

[Time Bandit]

A couple of sites I have found useful with regard to partitioning generally:

http://partition.radified.com/
Partitionning fiend - but good on the advantages of partitioning

http://www.theeldergeek.com/hard_drives.htm
XP orientated but useful with regard to primary partitions, extended partitions, logical drives.

Like most things there isn't one right way - it will depend on your system and how you use it.
One good thing to remember is that there is almost no such thing as having TOO much space.

[shbris]

why bother partitioning so much?

if your system needs to access a system file in first partition (say on outer area) and then has to access something in the last partition (say inner area) it'll have to keep moving the whole length of the disk to keep accessing the two files even if ur overall disk use is only half

using one or maybe two partitions should be fine, one for regularly used files needing higher access (system and games) and second for storage of files videos and photos which won't need such frequent access

was there and 'specific' reason you can't just self regulate ur disk usage of each type of file?

[PaulBrum]

What about a separate partition for the windows swap file - I thought that was good practice ?

Paul

[shbris]

maybe if it was on a barely used secondary hard drive used for not often used data, like videos etc. (ie the system can be accessing the primary drive AND the secondary drive for different bits of data, so using both drives in a kind of manual RAID system) but on one single drive probably best to leave it as one or two partitions

[peterb]

Nothing wrong with som many partitions (to be pedantic, it isn't the Windows partition manager that only allows for 4 primary partitions, that is part of the original DOS specification - but with extended partitions you can add more - so the first primary partition will be the OS, the second primary may contain an extended partition, which can be subpartitioned, and you still have two primary partitions left to use)

As for the disk access times, that may be a small factor, but the advantages of several partitions is that each one can be defragged separately, it makes backup a little easier, and it is simpler when it comes to re-installing the OS - just reformat that partition and re-install.

There is an overhead in disk space with multiple partitions as each extended partition makes 63 sectors unavailable (although the extended partition tables are only 64 bytes long) but on a larger disk that is insignificant, particulary when compared with other potential reasons for disk space being unavailable on large disks.