Advantages for partitioning a HD

[gmcbreadtrk]

Is there anything to be gained by making a partition just for a game and its accociated apps? Also can you assign ram priorty to that partition?

[davidgsmith]

Hello,
If it's one of those games that requires alot of saving, then it wouldn't be a bad idea.

I don't think RAM could be allocated for a specific partition.

But if you have enough RAM you may be able to run the game on a RAM Drive.
www.geocities.com\politalk

Check that site out for instructions on making a RAM drive.

Dave

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Check Ledger 2001 *** Help others less fortunate.

[Tuttle]

Not really. The only partitioning scheme that makes a lot of sense on most home systems is to have two partitions - one for the operating system, apps, games and anything else that will need to be reinstalled when you format, and one for the data you want to keep when you format. Any more than that doesn't really affect performance a lot, but adds to the frustration when a year later you realise you should've made the partitions different sizes.

[loek]

and then there is something that's called partition magic. wich is a powerful tool to resize, reorder or just ad and remove partitions.

the only advantage for a home system is what trutlle says, but when you go beyond that, you might to have more.

for example in a dual or multiboot system, or when you want to have appl or games on a other partition. i always have a partition to save data, just incase something ****s up windows. when you have a small primairy partition and a big secondery partition you could, if you want to, swith the virtual ram drive to that partition.

or when you do a lot of mpeg or video editting you would like some space to work in, without to have all that in your windows partition.

you can make so difficult as you would like to make it.

[gmcbreadtrk]

I also have a post in the ME section.

Let me explain here. I want to know what size the partition for Me needs to be. Not a guess but an actual figure. I think I want to put 1 game and its accociated third party files in another partition by its self. The rest of this accumulated junk can go in another.

My question is , will there be any advantage in putting the game and its other files into a seperate partition. I was thinking this would let the game run, load faster. I may be way off base so I come humbly here to seek answers to my guestions.

[loek]

if that partition is on the same hard disk as the partition of your OS, you won't get a faster game. The only advantage is if you have to reinstall, your game saves and settings keep saved, just reinstall the game and ready.

[smurfy]

Yes and no.
Having a BIG game on it's own partition (I have Baldurs Gate II [over 1GB full install] on a seperate 2 gig partition). I don't know that it makes it a lot faster but the savings will be noticeable if you do not regularly defragment your drives.
Having the game on a seperate partition enables you to just defrag that partition and speed up access to the files slightly.

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Sean (Smurfy)
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[shiva_42]

Just a little historical perspective here...

In the OLD days, having a smaller drive partition granted a couple of distinctive advantages. First, the smaller partition would most likely consist of much smaller cluster and/or sector sizes, which amounted to much less wasted space, especially if the software installed on the partition in question consisted of lots of small files. This is no longer an issue if you are using FAT32 on a modern pc/hd combination. Secondly, limiting the product to a smaller partition gave the hd less overall real-estate to manage when playing the game. In other words, the drive didn't have to move the heads as far to cover the entire partition allocation, which might still in today's world grant a small improvement in performance. However, as has been duly noted by many others, today the issue would be one of convenience and reliability in the event of a catastrophic failure, not so much an actual performance advantage.

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[This message has been edited by shiva_42 (edited 11-06-2001).]