
Originally Posted by
Saracen
I've never done a direct benchmark to compare between two otherwise identical setups, but my gut feeling is, as Iron Warrior said, no,it won't.
What I have done, for years, is break down a hard drive, or multiple harddrives, according to usage. A typical configuration on one of my PCs would be something like :-
C: Operating System
D: Applications
E: Games
F: Important Data
G: Archived Data
H: Miscellaneous
Mainly, this is to aid in backup and disaster recovery.
For instance, if I image C:, I can restore that image and have a crashed system booting immediately.
If I then restore D: as well, most of all of my apps are back running, saving spending several days finding and re-installing.
F: of course, for important data, is the one I back up religiously and regularly. In my case, that would be business stuff, contact details, work in progress, accounts data, email logs and so on.
G:, on the other hand, is stuff I have archived off-line anyway, so it doesn't need backing up. The "archiving" might consist of DVD copies, DVD-RAM copies, sync'ed to another networked PC or remote online storage, tape, or whatever, but it's stuff I know I can get back to the PC simply back copying back from the archive. Examples would be photos, etc, that are final work.
So, I take a photo, port if from camera to F: where it gets backed up as "important". The original master file then gets "archived" to one of those media types, and I might work on the image. Once completed, the finished image gets "archived", and moved to G so I can get at it immediately if I need it.
Another example of that might be MP3's of a CD. If you have the CD, you can always re-encode, so I wouldn't put MP3 files in a directory that's getting regularly backed up, because that would just add unnecessary system load. Hence, it goes on G:.
Depending on the hardware (how many drives), any of those drive letters might be a separate physical drive, or one of several partitions on a single drive. And apart from when any sync'ing is going on (and that's scheduled for convenient times), I've never noticed any performance hit from breaking down storage into quite a complex set of partitions.
But .... as I said, I've never benchmarked it to directly compare. Your mileage might vary, as they say.