How much should i partition for games?

[Silverwolf]

why partition? firstly there IS a fairly big difference in read speed from inside to outside of a platter. it reads outside first, so first files will be fastest. If your drive has 300gigs of films on it then you install a game, the game will be on a slower part of the disk.

Which you or anyone else will probably never notice in real terms.

Smack on 100gig for windows, 100gig for games and 300gig partition for the rest. music/films/backup work files don't need the best read speed, windows, page file and games will benefit from being on the faster part of the drive.

Which you or anyone else will probably never notice in real terms.

Biggest reason to partition? windows gets virus or goes **** up, you can during install format the windows partition easily , reinstall and not have lost any of your other files. Sure a dead hard drive would take it all, but it would in any setup. But most of the time a hosed windows install will only screw up its own partition and reinstalling or formatting that partition is 100 times easier when you separate windows. You can get fancy and try and make a windows folder very accurate on space. But i tend to just give it plenty of space and install most of the random non game programs in there and also keep it defragged and download to it, then move stuff i download to the slow partition, helps keep downloaded stuff nice and together as it can download in bits and be fragmented, be moved to another partition in one large defragmented lump and then windows partition is clean again once thats deleted.

Some truth in that.

Frankly because hard drives are cheap and big the actual sizes you choose aren't so important, just as long as you have enough space on windows and games, worst comes to worst, you run out and install stuff to the other partitions, won't be any worse off than if it was all installed in one partition anyway.

Some truth in that as well

Haven't used linux in ages but it used to be that FAT32 or that "other" file system was best to format with if you were wanting to access that partition from both windows and linux, ntfs was not good for linux access to a partition IIRC. Thats most likely changed though, was quite a while ago.

I have no idea about Linux

I have 3 HDs atm. 1 has Vista on, 1 has XP on, and the third has all my downloads on, drivers, MP3 etc. I also have an external HD or 2 which I backup to. I also Image the C: drive occasionally,must admit not as often as I should.

I see no reason to partition my C: drive, just makes life complicated.

I also used to put my swapdrive on a different drive,but, saw no speed increase whatsoever. But, I have always had a load of ram and a fast CPU.

But of course that's my opinion.

 

[drunkenmaster]

Basically, the main reason is to separate windows in case of meltdown, as windows has a habit of doing, also because i upgrade a lot and so reinstalling is fairly regular. Speed benefit is really, well, its there, may aswell use it. The biggest speed issue is defragging, when you move all the big files like film and tv over to a partition they will generally not get fragmented much at all and even wouldn't matter if they did. But it leaves windows partition very clean and easy to defrag, and likewise with games, install a game, defrag it, update several games, defrag.

Depends what you do to be honest as to if you will notice the speed difference. On something like a 7200.11 seagate you could be getting 80-90mb/s at the edge of the platter and 50mb/s on the inside, its a fairly large difference. But to be honest most games loading, windows loading and well most other stuff you won't really notice it.

 

[lolage]

Thanks for your advise!

At the moment i have an 80gb partioned 20/60..

20gb = windows
60gb= nothing at the moment


and i have a 500gb for music/files/data.

When i download firefox for instance should i try to save it on the 80gb or save it in my 500gb?

Thanks..

 

[Silverwolf]

Thanks for your advise!

At the moment i have an 80gb partioned 20/60..

20gb = windows
60gb= nothing at the moment


and i have a 500gb for music/files/data.

When i download firefox for instance should i try to save it on the 80gb or save it in my 500gb?

Thanks..

That is entirely up to you, makes no difference. But as it seems you are trying to seperate the OS from data files, I guess its the 500GB drive. But its your choice.

 

[fish99]

If you ever get a drive 75% full its easier to defrag and rearrange files with partitions

Surely it just means the amount of free space on each partition is a lot smaller than you would have on an unpartitioned drive, so therefore it's harder to defrag since there's far less contiguous space, no? If your drive is 75% full and you have 4 partitions, you have 4 times less space on each partition which is going to be a problem with defragging large files.

As for drunkenmasters speed arguments, I'm sure that's true, but something like Perfect Disk can put the most commonly used files on the quickest part of the drive.

I agree it makes reinstalling easier though, although I personally don't partition and have never had problems reinstalling an OS because of it. Different file system arguments doesn't apply here since I said 'in this case' and the guy doesn't want a FAT32 partition for another OS.