Is this a performance hit - NOT RAID

[stephen44]

Ok so we know the discusion of raid 0 vs single drive... but heres my question:

assuming i am encoding/ripping video to hard drive

Which is faster
A) drive partitioned as 1 big drive - OS the lot and writing/reading to a folder on this

B) vs what I was always taught 20GB for windows = C:\
and the all data etc (and temp files) on the rest = D:\ and writing/reading to here.

Talked to someone last night that says partitioning a drive slows it down.

Does it ???

[jtjuska]

Partitioning done right doesn't slow down a hard drive (ie. your meathod is just fine) and I partition my drives for the fact that I usually get a little bit better performance out of it. Where it is a problem is if you make the partitions too small and the drive gets too full. This tends to cause a lot of fragmentation and also it takes more time for the OS / hard drive controller to figure out where to put the stuff you want to with the stuff thats already there. This is just my .02 though so if someone thinks differently feel free to voice opinions

~jtjuska

[stephen44]

good point...and on a second note

assume 2 separate hard drives OS on 1 and swap file on second ?

this is supposed to be faster than OS and swap on one ?????

equally OS on 1 and all the temp directories on the second is also supposedly faster.

views ????? - getting this right wins as much as that extra .1 Ghz I would think ?

what do you think the "fastest" environment config is ???

[jtjuska]

The absolute fastest excluding RAID (cause you could just do the same thing with a bunch of RAIDs if you wanted to) would be to have 2 maybe 3 hdd's (depending on how much raw storage you need). On drive 1 have a 20gb windows partition (or OS of your choice), and the rest be storage. The Second drive be purely for swap (page) file and temp files, so this would preferably be a small drive or just a big hard drive with a small partition. Honestly I am not sure that it would make that much of a difference to get into that deep of a level but it is worth trying out if you have the hard drives to test with (hey thats me ;)).

~jtjuska

[greywood]

For either Rip/Encode or Games, I don't see much point to partitioning your OS drive. Both of these types of tasks call for a lot of data access, with relatively little OS access. So, partitioning won't make either any faster, and may even slow you down - the drive heads have greater seek distance when switching between OS and data accesses.

That said, putting your swap-file on a 2nd drive, at its outer edge for fastest transfers does make some sense. Though the difference in performance may not be huge, it can be noticeable, depending on how much system RAM you have and the demands of your application-mix.

Just my $0.02 if that's worth anything.