Partitioning my Hard Drive with Partition Magic

[Ricky Ervins]

Hey guys-

I was wondering if anyone out there had any advice for me on partitioning my hard drive. I just got a new Dell with a lot of RAM and a fast processor, but I wasnt loving the performance. A friend recommended buying Partition Magic and partitioning certain things onto different drives to optimize performance.

Does anyone have any SPECIFIC advice on what I should be putting on each drive. I have about 80 gigs to work with, and I am using Windows XP. If anyone knows any tips or tricks on how to partition out my hard drive in a way in which it would optimize the perfomance and speed of my computer, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!!!!

[Larry]

IMO, you won't see any performance increase whatsoever, certainly not enough to justify the agrivation of having multiple drive letters to go through when looking for something.

I have seen some special applications where partitioning a drive makes some sense, but they're very specialized cases.

At work, we have two systems that we've built for the purpose of backing up customers hard drives. These systems have very large, fast hard drives (in fact, they have drive arrays, for better performance).

And we've created a small partition to hold the operating systems, woth the rest as a seperate partition to hold the customer's drive images.

We've done this so that, if we have to restore the operating systems on these computers, we can do so without destroying customers data. (Haven't needed that option, but it's a nice safety net).

But that only helps if you (like we do) use a program like Norton's Ghost for creating backup images of hard drive partitions. I can see, for example, creating a partition to hold your digital photos, for example, so you can Ghost that partition.

But, if you're just backing it up to CDs, then you can do that just as easily if they simply have their own folder.

I've read some books on Linux, and I've seen some reasons for creating multiple partitions on a Linux system. In those cases, you're making an advantage of the fact that partitions can't grow when there's a need for growth.

[Ricky Ervins]

Thanks for your response, Larry!

Does anyone else have any advice??

[stevenaa]

Creating partitions on the same hard disk won't get you a performance increase. However, making a smaller partition at the beginning of the hard drive for the Operating System and then having a seperate partition for your data is a good idea. That way, if anything goes wrong that causes you to reinstall the OS, you don't have to worry about the data. You just reinstall to the OS partition and the data partition will be picked up by the new OS install automatically.

How to do this? Microsoft does not support modifying the partition size of the system partition. This is a bad thing to do and it usually causes stability issues. So, if it came with one big partition, you will need to do a reinstall or live with it. During the reinstall, you should have the option to delete the existing partition, and then create a new one and format it as NTFS.

When you say you aren't happy with the performance, what do you mean?

[Ricky Ervins]

Thanks for your response Stevenaa.

I have a 3 gig processor and I have 1 gig of RAM and I notice little things that reek of a sluggish computer... trails when dragging a window, long processing times when using my graphics applications (photoshops and flash).. and other little things like this.

[NoCalMike]

Did you build this youself? Check to make sure plugs and cables are correct, cause a lot of the times if you use older data cables, it could slow down the transfer rate of information.

I am ordering a Dell this weekend with the new dual core processor.

[big_rod]

Originally posted by Ricky Ervins

Hey guys-

I was wondering if anyone out there had any advice for me on partitioning my hard drive. I just got a new Dell with a lot of RAM and a fast processor, but I wasnt loving the performance. A friend recommended buying Partition Magic and partitioning certain things onto different drives to optimize performance.

Does anyone have any SPECIFIC advice on what I should be putting on each drive. I have about 80 gigs to work with, and I am using Windows XP. If anyone knows any tips or tricks on how to partition out my hard drive in a way in which it would optimize the perfomance and speed of my computer, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!!!!

Ricky, I am not sure you will benefit from a performance boost from partitioning your one hard drive.

If you had two seperate hard drives like I do then you stand to benefit from a performance boost as well as a safety measure.

For example, I have an 80GB "C" drive in which I installed Windows XP myself and as well as all my applications.

Then I have a 160GB "D" drive which I soley use to store all my data files. A performance boost can be gained by placing the Windows "Paging Files" on the "D" drive and NOT on the same "C" drive where Windows XP resides. "Paging Files" is a virtual type of RAM on your hard drive that Windows uses sometimes when perhaps low on physical RAM.

But again, this is only good if you have a second hard drive. Now the safety mechanism I mentioned earlier is that if either hard drive crashes or dies then you still have the other drive with available data as opposed to having one drive with the operating system and all data files.

I had a previous 80GB "C" hard drive with Windows XP instaled on it and the hard drive just gave out on me and died. I replaced the hard drive with a new 80GB "C" hard drive and reinstalled WIndows XP and all my applications; when the drive was back up and running I still had my 160GB "D" hard drive ready to use.

Anyway, that is an option.

ROD

[stevenaa]

Sounds more like you need to upgrade your graphics card.

[GrapeApe]

If your performance in general is sluggish, I'd look elsewhere than partitioning the hard drive.

I'd look at what is being loaded at boot time. You can run msconfig to see what it loads. If this is a prebuilt machine, chances are you are loading a large amount of junk you don't need.

If you really feel it's hard drive, get a faster hard drive. If you are running a 5400RPM drive, get a 7200RPM w 8M cache. Make sure the O/S is using DMA for your hard drives. In Windows XP you look at the settings for the controller. In Me/98 you look at the hard drive.

A lot of things to look at before repartitioning.

Linux uses multiple partitions for several reasons. Typically it creates a small boot (/boot) partition first. Usually 32-64M. This holds the kernel. This is because some computers have problems booting a kernel if it resides above 2GB's. Then they always have a swap partition. You can use swap files, but linux almost always uses a dedicated partition first. So that's two. Then you have the O/S partition (/). I also create a separate partition to hold user data (mounted on /home) so that I can reinstall or backup more easily. None of it is done for performance.

PS: When hard drives were smallish (3GB) and people worked with a lot of small files, you would sometimes create multiple partitions to make cluster sizes small. This allows you to store more info. On todays gigantic HD's with the typically larger files (media) you don't see that much anymore. Your friend must be old school.