Partition Science - Many VS Few?

[Plyphon]

Hiya,

ATM I have two 1TB drive partitioned 4 ways each = 8 partitions.

Replacing those shortly with a nice shiny new SATA3 2TB.

Would 8 partitions on this drive effect the performance or cause me issues later on?

Would I be better doing just 3? or 4?

Anyone who could drop some knowledge of performance of partitioned drives would be super awesome.

Thanks!

 

[Plyphon]

Hi thanks for the replies:

Well,

Reason for partitions:

I collect music, and as such I have three backups of all my music. I have two harddrives - so a partition each of music, and one external.

I then have a games partition and two "Stuff" partitions (one on each drive). I have an OS partition and then a partition for my photography/design and all music productions.

Total of 8 over 2 drives - 4 each can't be that bad?

Now i'm moving to one larger disk - and I also now have a laptop I use for music so I can cut down on music backup. I've also moved all photography etc onto it.

As my current drives have gotten older I've had all sorts of issues with partitions. Example two nights ago the MFT of one partition became corrupt and deny'd me access. I did manage to get back in using some software and get data back - but it would be so much more hassle if the partition was 1000gb and not 250gb! (250gb is so much easier to recover than 1000gb - I could stuff the 250 on my external easily)

However with all this talk of performance hits I'm tempted to try just 3 - one for OS, 800gb for games, then the remaining 1TB for data/music/etc.

Thats my reasons for the partitions anyway.

Slightly OCD orrrr?

 

[Plyphon]

A few interesting views.

I was always under the impression it actually sped up search times because the HDD knew what partition to search through as opposed to having to search the whole drive.

Example if I open G: and type in the finder "Debbie Does Dallas" it knows only to look in :G rather than the whole 2TB of possible data.

Is there any truth in that?

 

[Plyphon]

I've used the index options before to remove some files I didn't need showing up in search results - but that's as far as I went.

I'll get on the Googles and try to read more up on indexing, cheers.

 

[Plyphon]

Ah nah no mac in this build - I do own one and I have no idea what the feature is called on Windows haha.

Guess its just search box. But yeah this build is a Windows gaming machine!

 

[Plyphon]

although you may find it's not necessary given the speed of modern hardware.

On this note also,

This is the first SATAIII drive I've owned to date, so I'm expecting it to be quite rapid anyway.

Tempted to go down the SSD route for boot and just split the 2TB down the middle.

I'm just scared in 5 years i'll have all the partition permission & MTF issues I've been battling the past few months!

 

[Plyphon]

The SSD is obviously a good bet for performance, but with a spinny HDD SATA II or III won't make much difference - reading/writng from/to the disk's onboard cache will be quicker with SATA III, but most of the time the mechanics will be the bottleneck, and you won't get anywhere near saturating even a SATA II interface.

I'm not sure why you keep having issues with corrupt MFTs though - I'd suspect some kind of hardware problem, which hopefully will go away with your new drive(s).

Yeh, I remember reading about this before. Good points.

Yeah not sure what caused the corrupt MFT either. No sudden loss of power or anything to cause corruption.

I also had some permission issue where it wouldn't let me access the drive partition. Solved by tweaking the permission settings back to "All Users". Frustrating also.

Put it down to the age of the drive. Nearing on 5 years.

 

[Plyphon]

Yeah, agreed.

I think what I will do based the replies is meet my need for partitions and the argument for no partitions down the middle.

1: 200GB for OS
2: 800GB for games and music production
3: 1TB for music, movies, misc data.

I think that meets common sense VS OCD itching nicely.

Thanks all.