is 2 partion faster than 1? newb question

[adriana]

i was wondering if i had a 100gb hard drive and gave window about 10gb and 90gb to other files would that be faster than sharing the 100gb?

[dicecca112]

wouldn't make a difference

[CrackerD|ce]

I have never noticed any difference. The only real reason that I did this was so that if I lost my OS partition I would be able to keep all my other stuff on the other partition. Plus it helped with organization at times too.

[adriana]

I have never noticed any difference. The only real reason that I did this was so that if I lost my OS partition I would be able to keep all my other stuff on the other partition. Plus it helped with organization at times too.
sound like a good plan! thanks guys

[Cjwinnit]

i was wondering if i had a 100gb hard drive and gave window about 10gb and 90gb to other files would that be faster than sharing the 100gb?

I have done something similar with my 120 gb on the basis that the windows swap file can't grow to the entire space on the drive therefore (i think) quicker access.

[flamerail]

My 30gb drive is faster with 2 15gb partitons for booting windows than a single 30gb partiton... um.. idk? See what you think is faster.. I run 15gb for windows and 160 for files and applications.. also makes formatting easier.

[DickH]

Faster? Probably not. Should you? Yes!

I love partitions, they help me sort everything, and it really does help for if you run into operating system related problems. It also helps for when you have to defrag, defrag'n chunks of the hard drive is faster/easier. I am no pro, but I would give windows ~20gb, then give ~20gb for games or other larger apps, then the last bit for your files.

[AngelfireUk83]

So what would be the best thing to do with my 80gb SATA drive I get 76GB free and I currently have 1.70gb of MP3's on my PC. I have them backed-up up to DVD-R but I was thinking of partitioning it to something like 20GB for XP then the rest for programs and music etc.

I always thought that splitting a single drive in 2 would decrease performance.

[CrackerD|ce]

20 gigs is a bit large for XP. I usually donate about 10 gigs or around there.

[eobard]

20 gigs is a bit large for XP. I usually donate about 10 gigs or around there.
I agree. Even with the existence of programs that insist on being installed in C: the odds of you installing enough of them on an 80gig drive is unlikely enough to warrant 20 gigs. If you had a 250gig drive, and therefore could install 3 times as many programs as you could on an 80gig, then you might find yourself needing 20 gigs for Windows, swapfile and those "C: only" programs but even then I doubt it. 80 gigs is pretty small for a drive these days, I'd save as much as you can for D: and put only 10gigs, 15 gigs maximum into C:

[korruptedONE]

Here's my personal drive partitioning setup.

First, the logic. I NEVER install anything to C: besides windows, unless I have to because windows is stupid, but I digress. I do this for a few reasons. Organization is one. Reinstallation of my OS, or losing my OS also isn't a threat to my other programs, in the even that some failure causes me to have to reinstall my OS. My main reason, however, is fragmentation. The less files you move around, open, delete, etc on your OS drive means the less file fragmentation you have on C:. I try to only use the desktop when I have to, to keep files from being moved around/fragmented on the HD. This helps keep windows snappy, and helps keep my boot times down (RAID 0 Raptors helps too obviously).

Then, depending on how many drives you have, and how much of a neat freak you are, you can do a lot of things. My setup is as follows (rough guesses, as I'm at work):

RAID 0 Array (I need 150GB Raptors damnit!)
C: Windows, 10GB
P: Programs, i.e. Office, WinRAR, Winamp, etc (no games), 10GB
G: Games, 50GB

Maxtor 320GB
M: Music, 110GB
S: Storage, (FAT32 for Linux write/read) 10GB
V: Video, 100GB

I'm a neat freak. But I love the organization.

[AngelfireUk83]

The idea that you have labelled them with the letter for what your storing with them is absoluty genius I think. I couldn't of thought that I would of probably them as C, E, F etc.

When I do a fresh install and it comes to the partition section of XP can I just create partitions there. Like I would like to do what you guys have mentioned basically 10G to XP's installation. I'm using a SP2 slipstreamed CD I created with all my drivers and latest SP2 updates.

Then probably the rest for games and music but your idea of naming a partion P: for programs is a great idea. So I'll probably create 3 partion's 1 for XP, 1 for programs/games & other for music

[emboss]

Partitioning it like this will marginally increase load-time performance due to forcing locality of the files. Essentially, the system partition will be short-stroked and be using the fastest part of the disk. However, this comes at the cost of slowing down the remaining partition (again, minimally). OTOH, much the same result can be acheived using a good disk defragmenter which places load-up files at the start of the disk ...

[MadMan007]

I'm not sure that partitioning into so many segments is aq good idea. You guys do realize that WinXP does a pretty good job of automatically moving frequently used files to faster parts of the drive? I'm not certain if that goes for OS-related files only or any program files (I think it's any though) but it means that an 'OS-only' partition at the beginning of your drive could actually hurt application-loading performance because XP can't optimize the program files as much as possible. I usually do one partition with OS+programs and one for data. If I have to resinstall Windows I'd reinstall all programs as well anyway.

[AngelfireUk83]

That's my new idea now just to create an extra partion for my music that's mainly the most I have on my PC. And I don't want to keep re-copying them across from DVD-R everytime I format. As for defragg software I use Diskeeper 9 Pro excellent piece of kit moves files better has a great boot-time defragger. And has options to like moves all files onto 1 volume plus it's a lot faster when moving files.

[korruptedONE]

If there's a performance slowdown from this I sure haven't seen it in the years I've had this setup. And if I don't have to reinstall it, then I don't wanna :P

[MadMan007]

Well, how would you know if you've had it that way for years? ;)

It seems fine especially if it works for you. I was just proposing that WinXPs built-in disk reorder optimizations may not work as well as possible if one forces only OS files onto the fastest part of the disk and excludes programs from there. At the same time I'm not certain of that because I don't know all the details of how the disk optimization works. Also the difference between 0-10GB and 10-xGB probably isn't huge on today's disks until you start moving well above 10GB.

What I don't get is how and why you guys keep programs installed but do a fresh install of Windows with your separate partitions. Whenever I've reinstalled XP I've always redone programs as well because for all but the simplest programs just pointing to the .exe doesn't make the program properly installed.

[bing]

As long as I could remember and still believe its valid until today, computing industry has been battling with performance issues on disk fragmentations.

By creating multiple partitions, this is actually created worst fragmented regions at the disk that no defragmenter software on this earth could fix it. :confused:

Just take a look at yer favourite hardisk web sites, check the technical specs at each drive. See those terms such as average seek time, full stroke time, track to track time ..bla..bla... etc ? The better the number, the more expensive those disk will be, and trust me, money never lies ! :)

These measurement were made for a reason, that you should use your hard drive wisely to gain maximum performance. Of course, unless performance is not your objective or you got other higher priority.

Even memory can be fragmented on heavy load machines and with poor programs and poor OS memory management, it will impaired the puter peformance so badly. Ever heard of the word "routine or periodic reboot ?" :)

To avoid dupe posting, got a post at other thread that I think relevant in this thread, especially for multi drives lover ! Here ! (http://www.ocforums.com/showpost.php?p=4622990&postcount=7)

[emboss]

You guys do realize that WinXP does a pretty good job of automatically moving frequently used files to faster parts of the drive?

Nope, XP (without a third party defragmenter) does nothing of the sort. Even the built-in defragmenter running manually does not assign frequently-accessed files to the start of the disk. Perhaps you're thinking of the prefetcher? Also, AFAIK none of the commercial defragmenters do either (though they do move the files specified in the XP boot list to the start of the disk - this is merely a list of the files that XP loads during boot, not a list of the most frequently accessed files).

I usually do one partition with OS+programs and one for data. If I have to resinstall Windows I'd reinstall all programs as well anyway.

This is what I meant in my comment ("system partition" to me means OS + programs). Having OS + programs on different partitions is not so good, as usually both need to be accessed to load a program. Splitting this across two partitions forces larger seeks where they are not needed.

Even memory can be fragmented on heavy load machines and with poor programs and poor OS memory management, it will impaired the puter peformance so badly. Ever heard of the word "routine or periodic reboot ?"

Umm, nope. Free-page fragmentation has a negligible effect on performance (since the time taken to map the page is far greater than the time taken to find the page with even half-way modern OSes). Virtual address space fragmentation also has a negligible effect on performance - though if you get a really fragmented virtual address space (though poor application design, not poor OS memory management) the program will crash, which I suppose brings performance down to zero until it gets going again. If anything, the performance of heavily loaded servers increases slightly over time due to caching. Loading a server too heavily will cause slowdowns, but it's got nothing to do with memory fragmentation.

Also, routine reboots haven't been needed since ... umm ... actually I can never remember a time when routine reboots were *needed*. The only people who knew partially what they were doing and who did routine reboots were ATC guys who used NT. These needed reboots every 49 days or so due to an integer overflow bug in the software they were using, which they couldn't be bothered fixing (until they forgot to reboot it once and it caused all sorts of mayhem ...).

[bing]

Also, routine reboots haven't been needed since ... umm ... actually I can never remember a time when routine reboots were *needed*. The only people who knew partially what they were doing and who did routine reboots were ATC guys who used NT. These needed reboots every 49 days or so due to an integer overflow bug in the software they were using, which they couldn't be bothered fixing (until they forgot to reboot it once and it caused all sorts of mayhem ...).

Routine reboots still needed, trust me. At the company where I work with now, those IT Data Centre guys need to reboot the big server box running Windows 2003 (not that jurassic NT) with Lotus Notes which is serving thousand of users.

Infact their standard procedure (SLA) stated that they have to reboot that box at every weekend on 2nd week on every month, otherwise users will start to complain bout the slowness on email activities. Although I'm not sure it is related to memory fragment, but yes, routine reboot still there and required in real life even on latest Windows 2003 platform. Don't compare this with home puter running for months serving torrents, its totally different stuff.

-

[emboss]

Routine reboots still needed, trust me. At the company where I work with now, those IT Data Centre guys need to reboot the big server box running Windows 2003 (not that jurassic NT) with Lotus Notes

Here's your problem. Notes is, to put it bluntly, a pile of crap. That leaks memory left, right and center. "Rebooting" Notes does the job just as well - there's a reason why there's so many "automatically reboot notes" scripts around on the net ...

At the place where I work (serving up ~20K users, just about every OS ever invented running something ... heck, we've even got some VMS stuff around and a PDP-11 that's still in service), the only thing that needs rebooting are the damn XServes, which have a buggy NFS (causes kernel memory leaks) that dies and takes out half the SAN if you leave it too long. Pretty much none of the other machines are rebooted unless there's something being changed, or some klutz pulls out the cables on the wrong side of the UPS :|

[Enablingwolf]

I use partitions. For reasons not like most use them. The only reason to bust up a drive is ease of re installation.

The idea of breaking apart space has good reasons and is unique to each machine. My current drive setup is 1x80 2x120. I split the 80 50/50 the 120's are run in RAID1. The fun part and the meat of my post is that I keep all my drives on separate channels. I use 4 channels on my board.

Since I use 4 drives total. All the I/O's for them do their own thing and I can read and write at the same time. No bottlenecks on the channel. Controller, probably, but the channel is dedicated to one drive. I think I have 4 more channels that I can use, but nothing to fill them with... Yet anyway, I am getting ready for another array.

Here is how I thought my performance reasoning would be better then most for my class of setup/

The 80, (OS) does it's thing. While the rest of the drive is a dirty section and is hardly used. If I am dumping things and want a quarantine space, this is it.Basically it is a testing space for me. I also use this section for my HPA backups. This is the main reason I have a 50/50 split on the 80. Windows will report less space that is equal to my used OS size, since it is hidden I feel this works out for me.

The twin 120's are my page file and My Documents folder. It is kept intact, I just redirect any files to this setup. I can dump files here on the fly and still not experience lag on my OS. I think CPU time is a downside here. I sometimes will defrag as I surf. Long as I am not running a meaty PF usage. Having a bit of RAM helps me in this case.

Depending on how you use your machine and your needs. There should be a good way to lay out the space. A good use of a second partition on a single drive would be the My Documents folder. Just redirect it to the partition and if and when you reinstall you just redirect it again and all your files are intact and ready for use. It makes it easier also not having to redo alot of reg entries making all the embedded features work smoothly. i.e.- My Music, My Pictures and game save folders.

[AngelfireUk83]

I just want to back-up my music so when I format I don't have to keep passing them over from DVD-R+. So I think splitting my disc say 20GB for music and the rest for windows will do fine. See I currently am using just 2gb for music but that's only 363 MP3's at 160kbps but most of my tunes are extended mixes thus the size.

I'll do it on my next format without activating XP if I notice any slow downs I'll just do it again and stick to 1 single partiton. My board can have 2 SATA150 drives on and upto 4 IDE drives and 2 optical drives as it has a 3rd IDE slot. But that would put some serious pressure on it I think with it been an nForce2 AMD Athlon 2500+.

[shadowdr]

I think that there are very good reasons to partition drives. First being that XP system restore uses up to ten percent of available disk space on any drive for backup files. These are the most fragmented files on your disk. I turn off system restore for all my drives as I have my own backup plan. I have evolved to having five drives to keep all my files safe and as fast as possible. As space is not an issue I use the following partitions;

2X Raptors in raid0
C: XP, 30 gigs Windows only and static page file (working disk)
H: Storage, 107 gigs transient files like movies

2x Maxtor 80's in raid0
D: Programs, 30 gigs programs and games with static page file (working disk)
E: Downloads, 30 gigs all downloaded files in their own folder,Outlook express location
F: Files, ISO images RAR files
G: Space, 73 gigs, output site for movie files promtly erased after use

1x Maxtor IDE as a Ghost disk. A copy of each important partition for reimage, disabled in Device Manager.
L: XP2, 20 gigs
M: Programs2, 20 gigs
N: Downloads2, 20 gigs
O: Files2, 17 gigs

This works well for me as I can reimage or backup images in about fifteen minutes. Only the first partition on each array is an actual working partition. The others will not fragment at all unless written to.Response is far quicker then any single disk machine I have seen.

[MadMan007]

Nope, XP (without a third party defragmenter) does nothing of the sort. Even the built-in defragmenter running manually does not assign frequently-accessed files to the start of the disk. Perhaps you're thinking of the prefetcher? Also, AFAIK none of the commercial defragmenters do either (though they do move the files specified in the XP boot list to the start of the disk - this is merely a list of the files that XP loads during boot, not a list of the most frequently accessed files).


I don't know all the details but yes I was talking about the prefetcher. I did a quick lookup and found this page:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/evaluate/xpperf.mspx

Under 'The Startup Process in Detail':
Dynamic Determination of Code and Data Needed During Boot

By observing successive boots of the system, Windows XP can dynamically determine the code and data needed for the boot and can optimize the placement of these files on the disk.
There are a few graphs near that quote which seem to indicate that the files are in fact reordered.

Under 'Run Time Performance'
...Windows XP uses many of the same mechanisms to streamline application startup as it does to achieve a more efficient fast boot.
'Predicting I/O required'
File access patterns in the application launch are used to periodically optimize the layout of files on the disk; improved layout decreases seek time and provides for even faster launch and faster continuing use.
'Idle Time Activities'
Idle time activities include optimizing the layout of files and directories on the hard drive.
'Self Tuning'
As illustrated earlier in the Application Startup section of this document, the Windows XP self-tuning process effectively manages the layout of files and directories on disk, and takes this process one step further by reorganizing the layout of file metadata so that the footprint in memory is smaller. The benefit of this layout optimization is quite pronounced for today's large capacity disks.



So maybe prefetcher doesn't move them to the 'fastest part of the disk' in a literal sense, that isn't said clearly anywhere on that page, but it does seem to reorder files to optimize boot time and application loading. It may be more like a defragment involving reordering files for faster overall I/O with fewer seeks etc than moving files to physically faster parts of the disk.

I could swear I've read in articles (not forums) that files are moved to faster parts of the disk, maybe the writer confused what prefetcher did as well. It's too bad XP doesn't move files to faster areas of the disk because they've already done much of the prep work for that by determining which files are used more often or used together, you'd think they'd go one more step and use the defrager to do this as well.

[emboss]

I don't know all the details but yes I was talking about the prefetcher. I did a quick lookup and found this page:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/evaluate/xpperf.mspx

Under 'The Startup Process in Detail':

There are a few graphs near that quote which seem to indicate that the files are in fact reordered.

Indeed. If you look at those graphs (figure 1 and 2 in particular) you'll see that the prefetcher has moved them further from the start of the disk. The prefetcher operates basically by watching the order of I/Os during boot, then finding the largest free part of the disk it can and moving all the boot files (in the order that they are accessed) to that location. It does not move any other files out as a defragmenter does - it strictly moves the boot files into unused space (which is usually closer to the end of the disk).

[MadMan007]

How can you tell what part of the disk they were moved to?

[emboss]

How can you tell what part of the disk they were moved to?

Either you can code up something yourself (not too difficult, though not entirely trivial if you've never worked with NTFS before) or you can use something like DiskExplorer to browse through the disk manually.

[MadMan007]

I didn't say that to argue with you I just don't see how you can tell from those graphs. If it's from other info then ok.

[emboss]

I didn't say that to argue with you I just don't see how you can tell from those graphs. If it's from other info then ok.

I didn't take it as arguing :) You can actually tell it somewhat from the graphs as well - figure 1 and 2 show in the top part the sector offsets where the reads occur. In figure 1, they are mostly before the 2M sector mark. After the prefetcher has done its work (figure 2) they're mostly around the 4.5M sector mark.

[shadowdr]

http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Reviews/r61.htmlGo here for Treeview if you want to see your files on the disk. It shows them in order and has color options. You can hover mouse and see individual files and how they are grouped.

[adriana]

should i install program with xp or in another partition? will it still work if i reformat C while its installed D? thanks for the hefty info, recently i got super bored because my dsl contracted ended and well lets say you do stupid things when your bored... i totally messed up my partition and had to refomat. hah

[MadMan007]

That SequioaView is pretty neat although I really don't know what it means to me as far as file distribution. Are there any programs which can show the relative where files are physically located?

My setup is:
Main disk - Seagate 7200.10 320GB
c: windows and all program files - 80GB
d: mass storage for media files etc - 240GB
secondary disk - WD 1200JB
h: dedicated swap file partition - 4GB
f: 'archive' - here I store downloaded program files which I don't bother burning and miscellaneous utilities - 28GB
g: 'backup' - 80+GB (enough to hold c: drive plus its own file table) my ghost backup of c: partition.

Partitioning is mainly useful for organizing in terms of backup and (re)installing. For general organization folders are functionally similar and more flexible. A Windows/program partition and a 'data' partition, expecially for downloads is generally a good idea.

[AngelfireUk83]

Well I have just sliced my 80GB HDD I've put 10GB (Labled C) that's for XP SP2 and all the programs I need. And it's amazing I still have 7GB spare for any other programs the rest (Labled E) is space for games, music & pictures. And what I can't believe is I don't see no loss in performance what so ever it seems faster to me.

I have made diskeeper 9 set the MFT file on both of the partitons and defragged after I installed everything. And no loss in speed what so ever I'm glad it hasn't cause now I know my music will be alot safer on a sperate partion that being on a DVD-R. And I can just now format the XP Partition and know my music will be there again unless the HDD goes so I will keep a DVD-R back-up but wish I'd done this sooner.