Partitions

[Aketon]

I've heard somewhere that having too many partitions may actually degrade performance. I just wanted to know if this is true or not and how many partitions would be ideal for one drive?

[su root]

Back in the old DOS days, when the hard drives were slow and hard drive space was minimal, having more than one partition ate lots of hard drive space, and DOS had to take a few extra precautions when using the hard drive (having to double-check where the partitions started and ended). The main problem was that it ate space.. it eats something like 200 megs for every partition you make for hard drive overhead. Furthermore, it stresses the hard disk in some places, and not others.

Nowadays, a few hundred megs isn't a big problem, and every OS that I've heard of doesn't have a problem with partitions.

It may still degrade performance, but I doubt it would be noticeable at all. The only difference you would see is when you are using the later partitions, they are read and written to slower than the first partition (because of physical position on the hard drive). But, as I said, the difference is practically unnoticable.