Hard Drive Partitioning

[wilksj01]

Hi All,

I have just built a new system and am in the process of setting up the hard drives. I have 2 x Maxtor Maxline III 300GB SATA II drives. I was thinking about partitioning them so that I had about 60GB for the OS, programmes etc, 4GB for the pagefile and then the remainder for my documents. Then on the second drive I would leave as a whole and use for downloads and a drive image of the 60GB partition.

I would welcome any other suggestions though.

Cheers.

[itswesty]

Sounds like a good idea, although I would partition the rest of the first drive in chunks, perhaps 3 x 80gigs, and perhaps the same for the second drive. Or you could set them up in raid? Something I do not know a great deal about, but seems great, I am using raid0, but then not great for backups!

[arthurleung]

I would say:

First Disk 15,5,60,198G - 15G OS, 5G Swap, 60G Games, 198G Other
Second Disk 10,268G - 10G For misc stuff (rar extration, etc), 268G for other storage.
Could put another 5G on the second disk for swap too.

If you want to play around RAID0 then probably just 15,5,60,476G

[-ChEM-]

i dont see the point of all that

if you want to use the 2 disks to get a speed boost i would say the only things that really work are:
1. keep the OS separate to everything else
2. keep the OS in the smallest inside partition you can and dont use the rest of the disk except for storing stuff that wont normally be accessed

so keep your OS on something like 3-10gb depending on how many apps you plan on installing, then all your OS files will be on the inside track of the HDD and you will get much faster access times, this does limit you to only being able to use the rest of that drive for non-system stuff like films and music

everything else can go on the 2nd disk but again id keep the inside track for the swapfile, next for programs, then use the outer partition for downloads

that means unless you are playing a film or music, you will get great access times on the OS, and unless you are downloading you will get good access times on the program files and swapfile

so:
1.A - OS 3-10gb
1.B - Image of 2.B - 50gb
1.C - Files 240ish gb

2.A - Swapfile 4gb
2.B - Programs 50gb
2.C - Image of 1.A 3-10gb
2.D - Download dump 235ish gb

[hibby]

I think the swap partition will work best if it's on the second hard drive. That way, requests for the page file are on a different channel to read/write commands to your OS and Program files.

Also, this means you can partition for greatest speed. If you tell whatever software you're using to put the swap partition at the start of the drive, it will end up physically near the spindle and so get faster access times. You probably won't notice a huge amount of difference, but it's a case of "do it because you can".

So, I would suggest the following:

1st Drive Primary Partition : OS and Software (60 Gb)
1st Drive Extended Partition: Documents (the rest)

2nd Drive Primary Partition: Swap Partition (2x the amount of RAM you have + 1Gb extra if you feel you need it)
2nd Drive Extended Partition: Downloads (taking up everything that's free), Disc Image (60Gb)

If you don't mind spending money, and think you may want to fiddle with partitions at a later date without reinstalling your OS, I would recommend Partition Magic. I have found it very useful for shuffling free space between partitions on my 120Gb hard drive.

Edit: Hmm, beaten to it. Took too long thinking and typing.

[-ChEM-]

well im glad we agree on most of it

if you have <1gb RAM you should probably go with hibby as the swapfile will be important

if >2gb then prioritise the OS perhaps