Does partitioning effect speed

thelostsoul · 21 Apr 2007 at 22:24

Hi all, I have my harddrive partitioned, first partition for OS, second for games and downloads and third one for backups etc. Question, by doing this, does this effect the speed of the drive in anyway, or life of the drive. Thanks.

lay-z-boy · 21 Apr 2007 at 22:29

If you attempt to do something that is intensive to both partitions at the same time, expect a slowdown. Apart from that there should be none.

Banjo · 22 Apr 2007 at 00:43

Personally I don't like partitioning one HDD like that, simply because it means that the HDD is constantly having to be stressed to jump from the start of one partition to another and back again, hence (from articles I've read) it can shorten the life of the drive, and affect performance, although both are not very significant.

It essentially just makes the drive have to "work harder".
If you want to separate your files into groups (like OS / Games + Downloads / Backups) then it's better to do this through multiple HDD's, as instead of the bandwidth of one HDD being used for all sets of files, the groups each have their own bandwidth to use independantly.
Note: I've got 3 HDD's for this reason;
-Windows, games, etc. (160GB)
-Downloads (250GB)
-Backups (250GB)

Banjo

rpstewart · 22 Apr 2007 at 11:00

Banjo said:
Personally I don't like partitioning one HDD like that, simply because it means that the HDD is constantly having to be stressed to jump from the start of one partition to another and back again, hence (from articles I've read) it can shorten the life of the drive, and affect performance, although both are not very significant.

Partitioning a drive does not make it work any harder than an unpartitioned drive unless you're constantly moving and copying stuff between partitions, in which case you've got the layout wrong in the first place.

thelostsoul · 22 Apr 2007 at 16:30

Thanks for your input, i think i will stick with the set up i have got, it seems to work ok for me. Can't justify buying more harddrives to achieve the same sort if outcome. thanks.

IAmATeaf · 22 Apr 2007 at 17:35

I have my main OS drive partitioned, 40gb plus the rest I think, this allows me to clear the 40gb partition if I need to do a reinstall without affecting the data on the other partition, tis the only reason I've done this. I also have a second drive which the drive that I host the swapfile on, should give a slight improvement in performance from what I've read

FoxEye · 23 Apr 2007 at 13:19

My advice, assuming you have only 1 hard drive:

You need 1 partition for each OS (except Linux, which needs at least two).

Your primary OS partition needs to be the first partition on the drive (puts it on the edge of the disk which is the fastest place).

Don't have a separate partition for applications and games. They'll need to be reinstalled if you wipe your OS partition anyhow, and having them on the same partition as your OS let's Windows put the most accessed files on the fastest part of the drive (which it does automically every 3 days).

Don't have a separate partition for the page file (swap file). There is no performance advantage to doing this, and you can even make things worse. However, if you have more than one hard drive, make a small (1-2gig) FAT32 partiton as the first partition of your second (third, etc) hard drive. Set up static page files on every hard drive.

Having a separate partition for data (movies, mp3s and "my documents") is fine. Mine is sandwiched between XP and Linux, because I don't do anything performance related in Linux, hence I can live with Linux using the slowest part of the drive. This let's you nuke an OS partition ("it's the only way to be sure") without fear of data loss. Just remember that by default anything you store on your desktop is housed in the OS partition, not in "my documents".