Should I partition?

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About to build a system for video & photo work, I have 2x 500Gb SATA drives and will be installing Vista, Photoshop & Premiere Elements along with the usual office and internet programs.

What would be my best set-up? Programs on 1 drive, data on another. Or partition the drives to keep different data seperate?

Thanks.
 
Im not entirely sure if there is a right or wrong way to partition your hard drives it all depends on how you prefer it really.
At the end of the day the data all has to be read at some point.

I personally would setup 1 hard drive with 2 partitions: 1st for the OS and the 2nd for the Programs (eg photoshop + elements + office)
The 2nd hard drive I would use for data

This is obviously based on the fact that you are not dual booting, or considering raid.

I think its down to preference but some of the other gurus may have a better idea. I certainly would be interested to see how others would set theres up.
 
I like to go for a smallish system partiton on one drive - 12GB wasn't quite enough after a couple of years, running on 24 GB now. The program files directory would contain all utilities, office programs, small non-gaming stuff and serious software. I would store personally created documents here as well like mail files, excel, word, etc files. Any data that is imortant and not excessively large lives here too.

I like movies and pictures in a partiton of their own on the same drive as the system partiton.

I like games in a partiton of their own on a different hard drive to the system partiton.

I like the swap file in a partiton that is on a different drive to the system partiton.

I like a very large partiton on the non system drive exclusivly for backups.

The last point is the key really. Hard drives are now really big. Backing up a whole hard drive is actualy quite difficult and expensive - especially if you know what you are doing and go for a proper backup cycle. My compromise is to totally backp up the system partion using a disk imaging software like DriveImage, Acronis. With compression each backup takes 6 or 7 GB in my backup partiton with 12GB used in my system partiton. I can also dump out a backup image file to my 12/24GB tape drive for offline security. I back up the system partition at least once per week. I HATE rebuilding my software config from scratch with a real passion and this way of working protects my time and my really important personal data. My graphics and movie stuff doesn't alter much so I just back it up a few times per year. My games take up masses of space. I pick up save games, patches and config files if posssible from time to time but I can't really back them up regularly and am prepared to lose them in the case of a major disaster. Having said that with a pair really big modern drives I could probably set something up with a big backup partition on each physical drive and secure one physical drive's content on the other INCLUDING the games.
 
Wow EffBee, partitions everywhere!

Is 24Gb enough for all system files? My current PC (running XP) has a 60Gb drive with all system files on it and is more than half full. I had assumed Vista would be even more bloated. Does performance suffer when partitions fill up in the same way it does when a physical drive gets full?

I am not a serious gamer, so am not concerned about keeping them seperate - but would photoshop and movie software benefit from being partitioned in this way?

As for back-up, I intend to set-up an NAS at some point so all multimedia files are available to all computers and my wife can back-up her laptop. Until then I will cope with external drives and DVDs.

ndellar - no plans for dual boot and I'll leave playing with RAID for my NAS!

Thanks.
 
I am using Windows 2000 just now. I found a 12GB partiton plenty for years but gradual increase in usage due to email, monthly updates from microsoft, the odd little utility added here and there, and significantly all the same games from Oblivion and other games stored in "My Documents" eventually ran me out of space. 24Gb is massively plenty for me for the forseeable future.

I'm not so sure exactly how much space XP will need. That will be my next OS upgrade in the next year or so on this PC. I have used XP a lot since it came out and have a gut feeling it isn't so different from Win 2000 in it's size and speed of growth. I have no doubt Vista is a bloated monster and I wouldn't like to comment on how big it is after loading and how fast it grows.

Ask that question again slowly, out load, remembering not so many years ago and in XP's lifetime we were using 40GB hard drives. "Is 24GB enough for the OS" :)

Hard Drives don't fill up. Partitions on a hard drive fill up. You have to put at least one partiton on any hard drive before an OS can use it. The thing is OS installs tend to push you down the route of one physical hard drive equals one partiton, and at the same time tend to hide the partition creation from you. I just like to use the data structure that is the "partiton" to top level organize my files on my computer.

In terms of performance I think that having the OS on a different partiton AND on a different hard drive AND ideally in a perfect world on a different controller from your commonly used apps and data would increase performance. Getting the swap file off the system partiton and onto a different drive is useful too. a lot of people use a separate very fast relatively small comparatively expensive hard drive for just their OS for this very reason.

In order to make an informed decison about this you need to think about how a hard drive works. When the drive has to read a piece of data, it has to move the read head to the correct track, then wait while the platter spins beneath it to bring the correct bit of disk holding the data round to it, then read the data off. This is mostly slow mechanical stuff. When a partiton starts to get full files get badly fragmented which means that there may be hundreds of fragments all over the disk to be read instead of one contiguous area. That slows things down somewhat. With frequently accessed stuff on two separate disks you can see that there should be less mechanical movement - the OS can be doing one thing on drive while data and apps are doing something else on another. Clearly this leads on to the various sorts of RAID implementations. Incidentally Hard Drive caches are simply an attempt to hold stuff in memory on the drive to prevent having to go through the slow electro mechanical read process. One further thought for you - if there are two two partitons on one drive the mechanicals of readin/writing to the two are the same as if there is just one big partition so there is no point for example putting the OS on the first partition and the swap file in the second partiton. To get the performance benefits you need to get two (or more) physical hard drives working simultaneously to replace one hard drive doing two (or more) things consecutively.

Hope my ramblings help.
 
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Rambling is good!

Can I just clarify, when you say 24Gb partition for OS, is that OS only, or OS + Program Files, or OS + Basic Program Files excluding video & photo software and data, or some other combination?

Can I stick basic office documents on the OS partition, or should I keep all my user files separate. And on that subject, my old PC has 1 drive with standard XP install (i.e. all user setting and My Documents folders for all users on it) but I store all data on a 2nd drive. Is there an easy way to point the default My Documents folder to the 2nd drive? At the moment I just have a shortcut link in the My Documents folder, which is not ideal.
 
I always separate data from os/programs/games by using separate drives.

As for partitioning, I don't really bother with it myself anymore (have got fast enterprise drives) but it might help to put the OS on one partition with programs and games on another. As for the swap file, I usually disable it altogether.

All my backups are done outside of the case onto dedicated backup drives. Also as I mainly do web work, nearly all of it is stored on remote servers somewhere anyway.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that if you do stuff like video editing it might help to put those files on their own partition too.
 
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Rambling is good!

Can I just clarify, when you say 24Gb partition for OS, is that OS only, or OS + Program Files, or OS + Basic Program Files excluding video & photo software and data, or some other combination?

Can I stick basic office documents on the OS partition, or should I keep all my user files separate. And on that subject, my old PC has 1 drive with standard XP install (i.e. all user setting and My Documents folders for all users on it) but I store all data on a 2nd drive. Is there an easy way to point the default My Documents folder to the 2nd drive? At the moment I just have a shortcut link in the My Documents folder, which is not ideal.

Up till a few months ago, under Windows 2000 12GB was sufficient for my system partiton. I started to get bad sectors on one of my drives so replaced both with much larger, faster drives. The old drives were four of five years old. I copied the partitons to the new drives and resized them to suit. This saved all the hassle of reinstallation of everything.

To answer your question - I am not a total purist on the use of the system partiton. Because I back up the system partiton regularly, I tend to store important things there. Basically everything tends to go on my system partiton EXCEPT games (some of which these days run to 20GB each!), backups, photo images, movie clips and sound files. Unlike you, the multi-media stuff is unimportant to me. It makes sense to regard your work environment as the OS plus microsoft office, plus email stuff plus utilities, plus patches, plus os updates, plus driver downloads, plus important regularly used business software. Then keep this environment on your system partition. It shouldn't be too big. For me things like games are transient so don't really matter that much (though the save games and settings do matter and tend to go in "my docs"). I leave the microsoft "hard coded" directories like "My Documents"where they are to keep life simple. I don't necessarily use some of them like "My Music".
 
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EDIT: Forgot to mention that if you do stuff like video editing it might help to put those files on their own partition too.

So for this would you suggest application and data on a separate partition/drive from the OS and all other data.

At the moment I'm thinking
Drive1 Part1 - OS, ALL programs files, basic office files
Drive1 Part2 - working area for video/photo
Drive2 - all media and large data files
 
I always physically separate data from os/apps so would probably go for something like:

Drive1 Part1: OS, ALL program files
Drive1 Part2: Swap file if you use one (easy to do it for swap since you can pick a fixed size)

Drive2: Part 1: Working area for video/photo
Drive2: Part 2: All other data

Not sure about 'basic office files'.
 
So for this would you suggest application and data on a separate partition/drive from the OS and all other data.

At the moment I'm thinking
Drive1 Part1 - OS, ALL programs files, basic office files
Drive1 Part2 - working area for video/photo
Drive2 - all media and large data files


thats what i do, ( for years) running vista 64bit, is there any need to have a OS partition and a program partition? can not see the need? ( just about to install as samsung F1 750 gig drive:))
 
Depends if there are any particular programs you use that have scope for running faster and are disk usage heavy. I would only do it with games personally; everything else I use runs fine and is limited to how quickly I work and not the hard disk setup e.g. MS Word.
 
its probably worth introducing a little sanity into this thread. We are in the realms of optimization and fine tuning here. Not fundamentals.

PS: I don't think there is any point moving the swap file to a different partiton on the same harddrive as the OS. As someone hinted at earlier, with enough memory the swapfile shouldn't be used and before worrying too much about hard drive configs get enough RAM so that the swap file is never used by applications. The performance boost from that alone will be the best possible thing you can do.
 
I'm all for K.I.S.S. !

My current PC is 5 years old so I'm hoping to be blown away whatever I do. I think I'll stick with my original plan and partition drive1 for OS + programs and store data on drive2 -that is how I work today. Just need to decide how big to make the partition, on the basis it might be another 5 years before I replace this machine, room for expansion probably required...

Thanks all for your comments/advice/ramblings.
 
Just one point of interest..........
regardless of installing the OS on one partition and programs on another, all programs when installed still end up with data/files settings on the OS partition.
A lot of programs/software will NOT let you install them on anywhere but the default drive/partition.
So IF you install programs on a different partition on the same drive as the os and the OS gets messed up?
You still have to reinstall all over again.
 
myself currently:

Disk1 160gb: OS & Programs.
Disk2a 70gb: Games
Disk2b 70gb: Download&Ripping Temp
Disk3 300gb: Storage (movies, mp3, photos, large files etc)

I run Disktrix Ultimate Defrag everytime I move big stuff - install/uninstall a game program - delete something big - move something new to storage - this keeps the data nice and tight. Also if used from the start you can set it to stick games to the outer area of the disk, supposed to increase read times a little as its faster out there then in the middle. Its a pretty good bit of kit for a score.
 
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