Quake3World

It's that time again where I need to reinstall Windows (XP). I also picked up a Seagate 500GB HD. I'm interested in seeing how everyone partitions their hard drives.

I'm planning on doing something like this:

Disk 0 (240GB):
Partition 1 (240GB): OS + programs + games

Disk 1 (500GB):
Partition 1 (400GB?): Documents
Partition 2 (100GB?): Downloads
Partition 3 (6GB): Page file + application swap drive

I may want to split Disk 0 into a 8GB OS drive and have programs and games on another (not sure if there are any actual advantages to this).

Once I get my other computer working, I'll be using it as a Linux file server for network file backups.

So, what do you guys think? What does your partitions look like?

For XP I was doing 10 gig partitions.
For Vista, I do 30 gig partitions.

I have an 80 gig IDE drive that's has 2 30 gig partitions.
One boot for my normal everyday shit, and one boot just for games.
The rest of the hard drive is for User Data.
This is where I move all the user folders like desktop, favorites, pictures, etc.

Then I have 2 320 gig sata drives as a striped raid.
But I may change that 2 a mirrored raid.

Then there's my server & laptop drives, but it's roughly the same.

Partitioning like that isn't worth it. It's like making yourself an unmovable, inflexible folder. There's no performance benefit either.

I recommend sticking to 1 partition per 1 drive. Having one drive for OS and another for files is a sound decision. Having your swap file on the non-OS drive is also a sound decision (assuming the second drive is no slower than the first). Beyond that just use folders to separate your files because there's no benefit to partitioning and there are some big drawbacks.

BTW, Disk 0 is a RAID 0 array of 2 120GB drives. So should I keep the swap on that drive since it is (arguably) faster or will moving it to the second, mostly idle drive be better?

The reason why I wanted to partition documents from downloads is to reduce fragmenting. Am I right in doing this?

I was thinking about the possibility of have the 8GB OS drive for easy reinstallation (though I think I will probably need to reinstall apps anyway due to the registry).

I've got an 80GB WD IDE that is partitioned as my C drive with Windows XP and applications installed on it.
My 250GB WD SATA-II is my D drive and it holds pretty much everything else, such as music, games, documents, pictures, artwork, gamesaves, etc.
Basically, the stuff I need running fastest is on D.

I think I have OCD when it comes down to having an organized PC :icon32:

obsidian wrote:BTW, Disk 0 is a RAID 0 array of 2 120GB drives. So should I keep the swap on that drive since it is (arguably) faster or will moving it to the second, mostly idle drive be better?

Debatable. I'd say keep it on the raid array, but either drive is fine. Fix its size so that it doesn't dynamically resize and you'll see a good performance boost from it anyway.

The reason why I wanted to partition documents from downloads is to reduce fragmenting. Am I right in doing this?

It won't make a difference in real terms. Fragmentation on downloads/documents won't impact performance in any notable manner, and if it does a quick defrag once every couple of months will bring everything back in order. Both your documents and your downloads are data stores which will have items added and deleted over time, so they're both going to fragment. Set your torrent program to preallocate files before downloading if you're worried about that making a serious dent in fragmentation.

I was thinking about the possibility of have the 8GB OS drive for easy reinstallation (though I think I will probably need to reinstall apps anyway due to the registry).

A better approach would be to take a drive image of your OS partition once you've got it installed, patched, with all your regular apps installed. Then you've got a fast reference point you can return to.

The general principle of seperating your files from your OS and software is sound, but again I discourage you from partitioning, as it'll inconvenience you far more than it'll benefit you.

Thanks Foo, so I'm back to doing pretty much what I'm doing now. :icon32: