Partitioning Hard Drive

[bluephi1914]

Ok folks...we got the Operating system and overclocking issue taken care of. .....thanks to all who responded.

hopefully my last question... for a while

It is still necessary to partition your hard drive even using Windows XP... i have an 80gig Western digital... i was going to partition it into two 40 gigs.... or is that still necessary?

[nichomach]

You don't HAVE to, but I still think it's a good habit to keep an OS/apps partition and a data partition - at least if the OS gets hosed you can reformat and reinstall without worrying about losing your data.

[bluephi1914]

ok cool, i know before people said that you had to partition bigger drives because as a 80 gig the sectors were bigger and a 1kb file would take up 120kb.... but if you partitioned it then that same 1kb file only took up 60kb instead of 120kb.... if I'm making any since??


thanks nichomach

[directhex]

people find that you really don't nee to CARE about the clusters & sector sizes anymore - only partition if you want to keep things separate - i have an 80gb OS partition & 62Gb data parttion, so i can reinstall my OS without worries

--jo

[nichomach]

See Knowledgebase KB314878 for cluster sizes on NTFS and FAT volumes under XP. Is this what you were after?

[Austin]

I like 1 large partition as drive letters really 'p' me off. With FAT32 it isn't a good idea to go above 32GB, in fact anything over 8GB gets pretty wasteful with the cluster size. NTFS does away with this but obviously you need Win2000/XP to access NTFS, if planning to dual boot be sure the first partition is FAT32. IIRC cluster size for FAT32 on a 32GB partn is 32K, 32.1GB+ is 64K and far less compatible (eg WinXP won't install). The cluster size is the minimum space reserved for any file, a set of clusters will be used for bigger files but again you are stuck to a full cluster even if only part of it is needed. Basically this means on average you waste half of your cluster size for EVERY file on your HD, that's completely wasted space, if you have many small files (text etc) it gets worse while a partn with mostly huge files (AVI) will waste less space. Put simply NTFS uses a 4K cluster size whether you use 10GB or 100GB so you only waste 2K per file rather than FAT32's 32K per file, and FAT32 hates partns bigger than 64GB too. In Win Explorer select the root of your drive and then select all, r.click -> Properties tells you the number of files you have, then multiply it by your cluster size for a pretty accurate wastage.

eg. My 120GB is 85GB full with 66000 files. For FAT32 66000x32K=2112000K (> 2GB wasted space). For NTFS 66000x2K=132000K (< 130MB). You also have auto compression for certain files and selective compression which reduce the wastage further. Nice eh?

[bluephi1914]

well thats puts it all in prospective Austin... thanks SOOOO much

in fact, thanks to all of you....