More than one Partition?

I have a 40 gig hard drive and I asked Maxtor if it would be advantagous to create multiple partitions of the 40 gig drive and they said no. They said you should only worry about creating more than one partition for drives 80 gig or larger. True or not? Someone else told me that I should have more than one partition because the cluster sizes are smaller with smaller drives/partitions. Can someone explain this to me and how it would increase performance in relation to smaller cluster size. Not sure what all that means. Thanks in advance.

Smaller cluster sizes let you fit more stuff on the drive if you have a lot of small files. Larger cluster sizes keep the FAT (file allocation table) smaller which improves performance as you get the drive full.

M$ has done a decent job IMHO in balancing the drive size with the cluster size. My second HD is a 40Gig and it isn’t partitioned. My boot drive is partitioned because I like to keep a small boot partition that I can ghost easily.

I don’t see where partitioning helps organize stuff over just using folders. I might make a partition or reserve a drive just for photos – my images are all large and there isn’t any sense cluttering the FAT when I can make large clusters and not lose much space with the large files. By large I am talking 30Mb+ for each image and 128k clusters would be more efficient. Maybe even 256k. Utilities like Partition Magic let you assign any cluster size you want regardless of partition size.

But to answer your question, smaller cluster sizes just allow you to put more stuff on the drive at the expense of a little performance. I would just leave it as one partition unless you have another reason to split it up.

More explanation here:
http://discussions.virtualdr.com/sho...hreadid=130397

Also,smaller partition for the OS lets it scandisk and defrag faster...

You might also find it benificial to have a second partition to keep your back-ups,documents,drivers and any saved files.
Should windows go belly up [as if :rolleyes: ]you can quickly reinstall the windows installation without the risk of losing any files.

JLS - partitioning a HD can have benefits, but it depends (as with so many other things) on HOW you will use it.

If you, e.g. plan on installing/uninstalling a lot, experiment with your OS etc. you're better of with a couple of partitions. Why? Because you can easier maintain them (disk cleanup and defrag run faster) and an image can faster be written back to a smaller partition.
40Gb will take time to handle maintenance wise.

Quote:

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Originally posted by 104456
You might also find it benificial to have a second partition to keep your back-ups,documents,drivers and any saved files.
Should windows go belly up [as if :rolleyes: ]you can quickly reinstall the windows installation without the risk of losing any files.

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Ditto.

For a 40G boot drive, personal preference, I like to have an 8G primary partition, which gives 4K clusters for efficient storage of the many smallish files the OS uses. This gives other advantages suggested above. The remainder has 16K clusters which is fine.
For a second storage drive, I'd use one partition, giving 32K clusters.

Remember if you use, say, Partition Magic to set non-standard cluster sizes, you may need to use third-party tools for disk scanning and defrag.

For many years I've partitioned and I've never found any disadvantages. I typically partition C as the OS, D as Data, E as programs, F as swapfile/VM, and G as temp stuff. It works well for all the reasons mentioned above and more. See http://www.aumha.org/a/parts.php for an excellent article on this.

I first started partitioning after reading David L Farquhar's book, Optimizing Windows for Games, Graphics & Multimedia.

I've generally found that users with one big partition live in fear of ever resetting their system, and hence put up with all manner of unnecessary problems.

I run a 2 1/2G partition for my OS, 2 1/2G partition for programs and the rest for data. My OS only takes about 1 1/2G so I can ghost it in less than 5 minutes. Restore the image in the same amount of time. Same for the programs partition.

Fast defrag of the OS and fast recovery if it fails.