Partition or not?

julianhj · 23 Aug 2009 at 20:27

I've always had a single hard disc in each of my machines, formatted in to two partitions - one smaller for the OS and all program files, the larger for all my documents, photos, music etc.

I've done this for convenience (I like having a separate 'drive' for documents), and was wondering if there is a better way?

My laptop came with a C: drive labelled OS, which has everything on it, and a 10GB D: drive for Dell's recovery stuff.

When I get Windows 7 I'm planning on formatting and going for a 20GB OS/program partition and the remainder for documents. Is there a disadvantage that I'm missing? I'm not sure that I'm fussed with Dell's recovery stuff.

theheyes · 23 Aug 2009 at 20:35

With a single disk there isn't a significantly better way I can think of. Your current setup is pretty sensible so long as you are backing it up.

n1kunj · 23 Aug 2009 at 20:42

20GB is nowhere near enough though for W7 though, I'd go for at the very least 30GB (I'd recommend 40-50 depending on how much storage space you can spare, just in case) as Windows alone takes up around 15GB, plus you'll need a pagefile and then somewhere to put the programs. I'm using a similar setup only with documents on the OS drive as well and it's taking up 25GB total.

julianhj · 24 Aug 2009 at 20:20

Cheers, I've got loads of space at the moment on the 640GB desktop drive, the laptop is only 250GB though. I'm looking at a NAS to centralise storage. I back up on to a WD MyBook at least once a month.