Partitioning affect performance?

[Jacobman]

Im thinking about snagging the ST3250410AS drive cause ive heard good things about it. In doing so i would partition the first 50-80gigs or so for the OS and apps, then the rest for games. Any performance hit in doing this?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148262

[bing]

Get yourself a good drive defragmenter and defrag oftenly, it will be much better than the partitioning scheme like the one you're planning.

[AFG34]

^^so you're saying that partitioning is not worth it if you are just using it to get performance boost?

[bing]

Yes, from performance point of view, btw, what else could be more important than that "if" he uses only single OS ?

The OP mentioned that his plan to make two partitions which are for OS/Apps and Games, and "assuming" it will be used as a gaming rig, then the drive's head will be banging between those 2 partitions, performance penalty will be significant.

A single partition and defragged properly using "a good" defragmenter will definately beat that configuration.

Remember, partitioning is a permanent fragmentation, use only at last resort.

[Jacobman]

I guess ill just use the whole thing then, it was only gonna be for making things neat but since there is a performance loss i wont, maybe ill just make a games folder, lol problem solved. I use O&O professional defragger.

[bing]

That defragger is good one, lots of options & tweaking on the layout ! :thup:

[Enablingwolf]

The only reason I would partition a drive is for archiving. Other options for performance is to simply use another drive.

[Jacobman]

Thanks for the replies, cleared up alot of things.

[bing]

NP

Just digged out an old illustration I made years ago, hope this will help others ! :)
60775

[mulle1]

bing, i think you're forgetting something. No matter where on a single drive data is stored, the heads must move to get to them. By making a partition, you just put a bigger space between data on both sides of the partition. I don't see the decrease in performance you talk about

[Mpegger]

With yesteryears HD's, the performance penalty would have been noticeable. Seek times are averages, but alot of vendors do have the maximum times listed. Worst case scenario, seeking from the beginning of the platter to the end continuously, would result in a big performance hit when loading large amounts of data (hence why the swap file was best placed on a hard drive of its own, even today). Todays HD's though, have reigned in those max seeks times, but its still a performance hit that can add up. Of course, we're talking a few seconds at most, depending on the amount of data being accessed. ;)

Still, I prefer to partition my drive to better arrange what I have installed. But I also run multiple drives (currently 3 in this system) to help performance abit. I too have the first drive partitioned as a OS/Game drive. Sure, games may take a hit when first loading, but afterwards, it souldnt be a problem as any drivers/software that needed to be accessed and loaded on the OS partition, would already be resident in memory or the swap file (on a separate drive) for access by the game. So the initial game load time may be slower, but subsequent access to the game files would be the same as with no separate partition. I can see this on my two systems in my signature. Both have the same game installed. The main system has the single drive with a OS/Game partition. The 2nd system has a physically separate OS and Game drives. The 2nd system on the initial loading of the game, will load the game much faster then the 1st system. However, once in game, because all the initial data has been loaded, the 2nd PC "lags" behind the first when loading new areas/maps, and thats even with reduced texture sizes for the 2nd system.

[Jacobman]

Does anyone know the average read speed of this drive? This chart says is has a sustained data transfer rate of 110mb/sec, is that the average read? Because my current 80gig will do i believe high 40'smb/s average read and that would be at least twice as fast. I kinda am looking at quick initial load times, like changing maps and whatnot. So i would probably use the whole thing, just to be in awe of how fast things load, lol.

http://www.ocforums.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=57175&d=1179296953

[majinwar]

Not to thread jack this thread.. But when I get my 2 410AS's and RAID0 them, I was planning on partitioning 20gb from each of them. Then I was going to put my OS/Apps/Games on it, and then using a 3rd drive for storage. Is it a bad idea to partition it in my case as well?

Reasoning behind it was so that writing was restricted to that portion of the HDDs. (At least that's how it worked in my head)