Partition Science - Many VS Few?

Plyphon

Plyphon

Plyphon

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3 Nov 2011
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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!
 
Why so many partitions, why not folders? You can even assign a drive letter to a folder.
A separate partition for the OS is practical as you can make it the first on the outer edge of the disk which is fastest, and it makes for easier OS reinstalls/changes. Other than that there are only disadvantages as your're making the heads travel further than they likely would otherwise.
 
As well as the possible performance hit, multiple partitions are an inefficient use of your available disk capacity - you're splitting your total free space into small inflexible chunks, which inevitably leads to wasted space and/or overfilled partitions at some stage down the line. You end up putting stuff where it will fit rather than in a consistent and logical folder structure, and it can all get a bit messy.

If you only have a single HDD, there's a good argument for creating separate OS/application and user data partitions, to minimise the hassle in the event of a reinstall, but other than that I'd stick to one partition per physical disk as far as possible.
 
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?
 
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Plyphon said:
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?
Click to expand...
If you're happy with multiple partitions and they work for you, then by all means stick with the arrangement - it's your data after all. The potential performance issue probably won't be that significant on a decent modern HDD, and only you can determine the most efficient way to utilise your own available space.

My own variety of OCD gets upset by seeing a rash of drive letters in Explorer, and personally I find it makes it harder rather than easier to organise stuff. Different strokes for different folks and all that. :)
 
Plyphon said:
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.
Click to expand...

There's absolutely no performance hit. There is a limit of 4 partitions per disk on "basic" disk types, and "dynamic" and GPT disks have all sorts of associated gotchas which means unless you know what you're doing, it's best to avoid them.

Partitioning a disk unnecessarily is very inefficient use of the space as someone else already pointed out. Honestly the only reason for splitting a drive is to have the System drive on its own partition so it can't be filled up by data, causing the operating system to crash.
 
2 partitions max per hard drive imo.

One for the OS, then data on the other.


No OS on the hard drive? One partition. Just use folders, less hassle!
 
rotor said:
There's absolutely no performance hit.
Click to expand...
There's a *potential* performance hit caused by multiple partitions spacing the data apart and forcing longer seeks, and the data on the inner sector partition(s) will obviously be subject to a lower STR than that on the outer part of the platters. Whether any of that would actually be noticeable in normal day-to-day use is another matter.

The main reason for avoiding multiple partitions IMO is that it's a bit of a mugs game trying to predict what should go where, and hoping that you've allocated space correctly for future needs (you almost certainly won't). With one big partition, each dataset has the entire disk to expand into as much or as little as it needs.
 
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?
 
Well yes, but you can just tweak your file index locations so they'll be found instantly anyway..


Look at 'indexing options' in Windows
 
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 said:
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?
Click to expand...
The search box in Windows Explorer will search only the current folder (and subfolders) rather than the whole drive by default, so in practice there's not much difference between saying "search this folder" and "search this drive." Either way you can speed up searches making sure your regularly used locations are indexed, although you may find it's not necessary given the speed of modern hardware.

Your use of the word "finder" suggests you may be using a Mac though, and I have very little knowledge of such things. :)
 
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!
 
CaptainCrash said:
although you may find it's not necessary given the speed of modern hardware.
Click to expand...


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!
 
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).
 
CaptainCrash said:
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).
Click to expand...


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.
 
Splitting into an OS and Data partitions could speed up Windows as the entire OS partition will be on the quickest part of the drive and have smaller seek times compared to a 1TB partition. With modern file caching and pre-fetch in Windows it's unlikely to be noticeable to be honest. Then again if it's flitting between the Windows partition and one of the others then it'll slow it right back down again as it balances the seeks between opposite ends of the disk.

I'm all for splitting the OS and Data across different drives/partitions but I can't see the point in putting Music, Games, Stuff etc across different partitions. You might as well use three folders at the top level of one large drive.

The indexing in Windows 7 is pretty quick, you'd get the same effect by selecting the Music/Games/Stuff folder then searching from there.

Personally I'd get an SSD for your OS, then shove all the Data on a mechanical drive, perhaps a second one for backup purposes.
 
Save up and get a bigger than 60gb ssd I own one and wish I'd saved for a 120 or even 256gb drive it's great having games on it as they load up much faster if anything it's apps that don't need to be on a ssd as load times don't really matter on apps for me as much as they do games.
I have read that ssd's like free space cant say I've noticed a huge difference I have 15.8 gb free on my 60gb and it's still 278mb sec speed.
Only time I'd be thinking partition is say I had a 1tb that I wanted to put games on i'd probably have a good size partition for games and rest for storage.
 
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.
 
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