Best HDD partition setup for Windows 7 & Applications

Sanchez

Sanchez

Sanchez

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Hi,

I suspect I know the answer to this already but I'll ask just to make sure.

I'm looking for the best way to partition and run Windows 7 with 2 hard drives.

I have a 300 and 500Gb drive and I'm thinking:

Windows 7 on 300Gb (C) and the the 500Gb drive partitioned into 2 with say a 100Gb drive for Program Files (E) and a 400Gb for a backup (music, films etc, drive F).

I this the recommended setup?

Thanks :)
 
Which is your fastest drive? Put Windows on that.

The partitions are down to how you want to organise, manage and defrag your data - also how much data you have.

I'd personally just leave it as C:\ for your system/apps/games/temp data and use the other drive for data or backup as D:\
 
Hmm. I understand that I don't quite need a 300Gb drive for Windows but it was as costly for a 300Gb drive as for a 120. My budget didn't stretch to SSD unfortunately.

I've around 150Gb of music etc which is why I chose the 500Gb drive. I want plent of room for future use.

Are we basically saying that it's not really here nor there were you have you Windows and program files partition as long as their on the fastest drive>
 
Sorry, yeah. I'd obviously keep the storage files seperate. I might just go for Windows and Program Files on C and then Keep the other drive solely for storage.

I'm assuming that SSD drives will give a notable performace increase then over SATA?
 
ChileanLlama said:
Which is your fastest drive? Put Windows on that.
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+1
I also like to partition smallish c: for Windows/apps which I then ghost every couple of months. Allows for easy recovery, also if windows goes screwy I only need to copy off Favorites before reghosting or rebuilding.
Move My docs to different partition too
 
I think that partitioning drives in this way has mostly died a death with the advent of good quality imaging programs like Acronis etc. I just use my 500gig HD as one single volume now. My second 500gig slave drive I have spilt into two. On the one partition I use that to store full images of my C: Drive and on the other partition I run Linux. I also do a second backup with full images to an external drive just to be on the safe side. If things go wrong, which is rare then I just do a full image restore. As the oldest of these is never more than two days old then losing data is not really an issue.

Acronis also lets you mount images as a virtual drive so if you just want to retrieve some data simply mount the image then drag and drop what you need.
 
I suggest a separate fast physical hard drive for your OS. You might want to have separate partitions on this drive for different OS or even different instances of the same OS for different usages. Keep the OS partitions fairly small so they can easily be imaged off as a form of backup. I suggest only keeping utilities, backup software, security software only on the system partition.

I suggest a separate physical hard drive for end-user apps, games, data, etc. Partition it so that data is on one partition, games on another, serious apps on another.

I also like a separate partiton (even physical hard drive) as a backup area.

Disk storage is amazingly cheap. My new rig will have 10 times the storage of the one I am using now for less than twice the cost.

Let me just say this is what I roughly do with other OS, haven't tried it YET with Windows 7 but see no reason not to do it again. If anyone has any major objections I would love to hear them :)

The main reason for all this partitioning is to enable me to have some kind of robust backup cycle. A decent backup needs to be offline with multiple cycled copies. Hard disks these days are just so damned big that other data storage technologies become hugely expensive if you try to completely backup everything on your system and keep several copies (as you should).
 
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EffBee said:
I suggest a separate fast physical hard drive for your OS. You might want to have separate partitions on this drive for different OS or even different instances of the same OS for different usages. Keep the OS partitions fairly small so they can easily be imaged off as a form of backup. I suggest only keeping utilities, backup software, security software only on the system partition.

I suggest a separate physical hard drive for end-user apps, games, data, etc. Partition it so that data is on one partition, games on another, serious apps on another.

I also like a separate partiton (even physical hard drive) as a backup area.

Disk storage is amazingly cheap. My new rig will have 10 times the storage of the one I am using now for less than twice the cost.

Let me just say this is what I roughly do with other OS, haven't tried it YET with Windows 7 but see no reason not to do it again. If anyone has any major objections I would love to hear them :)

The main reason for all this partitioning is to enable me to have some kind of robust backup cycle. A decent backup needs to be offline with multiple cycled copies. Hard disks these days are just so damned big that other data storage technologies become hugely expensive if you try to completely backup everything on your system and keep several copies (as you should).
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Post 10 works for me and is just as efficient.
 
Faustus said:
Post 10 works for me and is just as efficient.
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Yes nothing wrong with it really.

I like mine though because the system partition which is quite small and is the biggest pain to rebuild from first principles can be backed up frequently, very quickly, and the image being very small means I can store quite a lot of old images in my backup cycle. Further, With a small image I can push it out to tape media inexpensively for offline security.

My data such as jpgs, mp3 etc is quite big, not very volatile and easy to recreate for the most part so backups are large and infrequent.

My end-user apps, mostly games, seem to double in size every year or so. The total volume is huge, and getting huger. The only feasible backup strategy is to image it to another drive in the system, and since reinstalling games is no great pain it isn't worth offlining it. Patches and save games are elsewhere though as they are often irreplaceable.
 
I prefer a seperate partition because it makes it very fast to find my data.

D:\ followed by pictures, videos, documents or music - plus a couple of others such as xampp, openttd etc - it just means that I spend less time scanning the folder.

I'd assume that the 500gb drive is likely to be faster, although you should test this beforehand. My personal preference would then be:
500gb drive split 200/300, 200 for windows+apps
300gb drive for data

The 300gb partition on the main drive is then used to backup the data drive.

It probably sounds counter-intuitive to put the data on the slower drive, but I find it makes the machine quieter and less prone to lock ups as it's not trying to multitask on the first drive, it's at the expense of slightly slower read/writes from the data drive, but that's not usually of consequence.
 
Even so, Acronis backs up my entire 100 gigs worth in around 40 minutes and restores in around the same time. I have found I only need to keep a couple of full images on two separate drives, i.e. slave and external, so that's 4 images in total. Being a single volume if the worst does happen then I can be up and running again everything back as it was in around 40 minutes. If I had everything on separate partitions then by restoring just the OS I would then have to reinstall all the programmes and apps which in effect would be like a clean install - a much longer job.

I prefer a separate partition because it makes it very fast to find my data.
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If you use something like Vista search or Windows 7 then it should be just as fast regardless of what partition your data resides on.
 
Not when I have 20 different versions of the same file and can't remember which number is most recent, and I regularly browse the folder, rather than looking for a specific file.

I don't suggest at all to seperate apps and OS - keep one partition for both and image it when it's set up how you like it; I merely suggest keeping data seperate - I find that it keeps things tidier, with the second advantage that I can run occasional OS image backups, with much more regular backups of the data partition.

That way, I can back up just the area which is likely to change regularly, while keeping the relatively static OS+apps+settings seperate. ie my OS gets backed up once a month to get any major changes, and my files at least every week automatically, with extra backups if I'm doing a large project.
 
Faustus said:
I think that partitioning drives in this way has mostly died a death with the advent of good quality imaging programs like Acronis etc. I just use my 500gig HD as one single volume now. My second 500gig slave drive I have spilt into two. On the one partition I use that to store full images of my C: Drive and on the other partition I run Linux. I also do a second backup with full images to an external drive just to be on the safe side. If things go wrong, which is rare then I just do a full image restore. As the oldest of these is never more than two days old then losing data is not really an issue.

Acronis also lets you mount images as a virtual drive so if you just want to retrieve some data simply mount the image then drag and drop what you need.
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The outer part of the drive is the fastest area and this is where partitions are created from. So partitioning can improve performance.
 
AbsenceJam said:
The outer part of the drive is the fastest area and this is where partitions are created from. So partitioning can improve performance.
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Theoretically yes but with modern PCs where you have fast processors fast hard drives and plenty of RAM I doubt a human being would be able to detect a real difference in performance by doing what you suggest.
 
Faustus said:
Theoretically yes but with modern PCs where you have fast processors fast hard drives and plenty of RAM I doubt a human being would be able to detect a real difference in performance by doing what you suggest.
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Wrong, very wrong.

The innermost part of the drive is only about 60% of the speed of the outer.
 
AbsenceJam said:
Wrong, very wrong.

The innermost part of the drive is only about 60% of the speed of the outer.
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What is wrong, please quantify? I was agreeing but asked given today's fast PCs whether one could actually notice the performance hit. If you're going to quote percentages then also quote real time speed differences.
 
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