Performance gains with partitions

[AD-15]

hello,

I've heard that using multiple hard drives in a gaming system can be useful wrt performance, as you can have your intensive games on one drive, and all the other stuff on the primary C drive.

However, I'm using a laptop, and I therefore only have one (160GB) drive. The first thing to occur to me was to simply 'partition' the drive, so that it would be as if I had two seperate drives. However, would there still be any performance gains to this? Or would it be useless as all the stuff is still on the same physical drive anyway?

Thanks!

[aidanjt]

Splitting up the HDD into partitions is a cheap way to maintain performance on the HDD. For e.g. you can have your page file as your first partition, windows as your second, games and programmes as your third, and data files as your forth and final. That will force data onto particular parts of the HDD platter(s) and minimise file fragmention, and the effects of it. There's a bit of fiddling involved but it does produce results.

[r3morse]

I've been told by a few friends that if you are using only one drive there would be some sort of peformance gain from splitting the hard drive and using the faster part for more demanding apps ( i'd guess the better half being the outer edge... but not sure).

I don't know though, I really doubt myself that your going to notice much as long as it's not fragmented.

[Cheapy]

Iv had all my hardrives partitioned so I dont know if there is any difference beweten partitioning and not partitioning but it does make it a lot easier to find things on your hardrive. All your data like music and videos and so on can go on one partition, all your games on another and everything else on a final one.

[wellswells]

I can't cope without partitions anymore. It keeps your harddrive a lot less fragmented. Is easy to clean up. Allows you to easily format, reinstall windows/linux etc when your pc needs a spring clean.

I usually go with half partitioned for windows, office, adobe suite etc. Quarter for Music, videos, pictures, and a quarter for games and any software I'm unsure about ie software that I install on a whim because I think its going to do something useful, but probably never use.

[sadbuttrue]

Read/Write speed and access time gets worse the further along the disk you go.



I generally partition the first 20% of a drive for performance needs (windows/games/swapfile) and use the remaining 80% for storage.

[r3morse]

Lol, I'm still using a IDE drive. Man does my HDD suck