Ideas on partitioning are welcome

ntg · 25 Nov 2009 at 13:38

Alright,

As per my other post on the problem I had with my hard drive, as I feared it might be dying I ordered a new 1.5TB drive.

So now I'll have 3 drives, 2x1TB and 1x1.5TB.

How would you partition them?

Keep in mind that I definitely need the following partitions:

System partition, for the OS and programme installations only
Work partition, for my personal files, photos and uni/work staff
Pagefile partition, only for the pagefile in a separate disk from the OS

I am also thinking of setting up some backup system (at the moment I use Acronis which backed up my work partition to the 2nd hard drive) so that has to be included.

Ideas/Suggestions welcome!

LivesInABox · 25 Nov 2009 at 14:18

Depends on what you use your pc for and what os & what platters in the HD's. I'd personally setup something like the following

1TB [30GB OS Partition] [Users/Documents/Downloads Partition]
1TB [100GB Programs Partition] [Work/Photos/Videos Partition]
1.5TB [30GB Pagefile/TEMP/IE&FF TEMP Partition] [Backup Partition]

That short strokes the first partitions for the important stuff, and when you a run programs all 3 drives can be accessing at the same time (program loading, os stuff like dll's/drivers and things being swapped in and out of pagefile). A 4GB pagefile should be fine (assuming win7 & 4gb ram) and your not doing any big stuff. You could split the pagefile across all 3 drives if you wanted, but i've not seen much benefit of that. And it makes backing up easier as everything is separated.

Overall it probably wont make that much difference what ever you do, just less stalls overall and a bit smoother/slightly quicker loading. I wouldnt waste too much time thinking about it

ntg · 25 Nov 2009 at 14:32

Thank you for the reply,

Your suggestions seem very reasonable. I am not a heavy user per se, but I download quite a lot of stuff so I like to have lots of space. My only real requirement is to figure out an effective backup strategy. At the moment I am thinking of nightly backups of my 'important stuff' from one disk to another - so that should sort out any issues.

IAmATeaf · 25 Nov 2009 at 15:43

If you're running Vista or W7 then I'd make the OS part at least 50gb as the space quickly gets consumed. I have my OS part at 80gb at the mo. overkill maybe as there is around 30gb free but it gives you space to install whatever you want without having to resize it as some future date.

I have the following:

500gb drive - 80gb for OS, rest as 2nd partition for backups and downloads storage
1.5tb drive - as 1 large partition for user docs and games
1.5tb drive - as 1 large partition for pics, music and vids

ntg · 25 Nov 2009 at 15:59

What would be the best way to create a mirror image of my OS partition to another disk (once I have set it up), so in case I want to reformat my drive I just copy the mirror partition on the original OS partition and everything is hanky-dorry again?

Acronis?

IAmATeaf · 26 Nov 2009 at 10:05

I normally use Ghost to copy the OS partition off to a network drive, then burn that to DVD, but what you could do is setup say a 10gb fat32 partition then Ghost off the OS partition to the FAT32 partition.