Suggestions for partitioning Hard Drives

[Electric Amish]

I'm assembling a system for a friend and he says he wants his 2 HD's setup in the following manner:

Both on primary channel
OS on 4gb partition of HD1 and MP3's on 16gb partition of HD1

HD2 will have Games/Apps/downloads on it.

Does anyone see a problem with this? Speed wise?

thanks,

amish

[spoogenet]

What kind of bus? ATA66? 100?

I would usually recommend putting the two drives as masters of their own channels. I don't usually mix hard drives on the same channel unless for some odd reason I must.

I think it's a good idea to give the OS it's own partition. I also like to give my applications their own partition as well, since my apps and OS tend to remain fairly consistent I don't have many fragmentation issues.

I use my remaining partitions for games, files, etc. Those may get fragmented more since I move things around a lot, but at least they don't mess up my OS and apps drives.

b

[HedsSpaz]

spoogenet, the problem with putting both drives on the same channel, is that as soon as you add a CDROM/DVD drive to either channel it pulls the master drive down to UDMA/33. There are currently no CD/DVD drives that support, let alone take advantage of, anything above the ATA33 spec. Because of this, I always put my hard drives on channel 1, and CD/DVD drives on channel 2.

Ian

[Gurm]

How to partition?

DON'T.

All the speed you think you're gaining from setting up your hard drives "just so" will be lost the instant you partition.

WHY?

Because the hard drive head will continually be jumping back to the very beginning of the drive. Makes all your seeks into "worst-case" random seeks.

So, how do I recommend it?

Smaller drive as the system/app drive, and keep it EXTREMELY well defragmented.

Bigger drive on a different channel as the media drive.

And last but not least, I wouldn't worry about CD-ROM devices. I know all about the theoretical slowdown from having a slow device with a fast device, but as long as your CD is at least UDMA1 (PIO4) you won't have too much of a problem.

Or, if the drives are U66/U100 just spend $20 and get a Promise Ultra66 or Ultra100 controller for the hard drives.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[Ares' Lament]

It is a good idea to make a partition of your HDD since Windows always mess up with its swap file management.
Split your HDD into two partition.
Put OS and vital software (IE, Outlook, Office, Corel, etc) in main partition, and the rest (games, MP3, MPG, DAT, JPG, GIF etc) in second partition.
For large HDD it is also good to make an additional partition for Windows Swap File.
Try to arrange: C:OS D:swapfile E:myData

[spoogenet]

Ok, so between Gurm and HedsSpaz, who's right about the performance issue with the CD drives? I've never considered that personally, however I can see the argument. But not knowing much about it in detail, I wouldn't know to say it's right or wrong.

Besides, I just use all SCSI for my own stuff, so I don't worry too much about IDE channels. Wait, I have one IDE drive in my system, oops, forgot to replace that one.

b

[Gurm]

Ares:

No, you have it 100% backwards. The way you are suggesting to set things up will give you the WORST performance:

Also:

As far as CD-ROM drives go... YES, old ones will make your HDD performance suck. But it's pretty much up to the drivers to make sure that doesn't happen with reasonably new equipment. If you have a crappy VIA (i.e. 133 or older) controller, then it's pretty hit-or-miss. If you have an Intel controller or a Promise, I wouldn't worry about it. If you have Highpoint, well then what are you doing hooking CD devices up to it anyway (it's well known that CD devices don't work correctly on HPT controllers).

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[Electric Amish]

So he has 2) 20gb HD's.

For max performance he should setup one as OS/App/Games as the Master on the Primary Channel and then the other as Primary on the Secondary channel for "Media"...do you mean storage/MP3/Data??

thanks

amish

[Jammrock]

This is probably overkill, but with my new board (Abit KA7-100), whenever that arrives, I plan on putting each device on it's own controller. Just for the hell of it. I doubt I'll get much of any performance gain, but it'll be fun to play with.

Put the 27 GB on the primary ATA-100 channel, the 60 GB on the second. Put the CD-R on the IDE Pri Master and the DVD on the Sec Master. It's a lot of cables, and it'll probably be a mess, but oh well =) I've been bored this week.

As for partitioning...I'm a big partition freak, but for organizational reasons. I find it easier to organize my stuff with partitions. I have one partition for each OS. I have partitions for Video sotrage, Music storage, Games, Apps, a video temp (for ripping and streaming purposes) and one for download/temp stuff. But then I have 87 GB of space so if I don't I have a tendency of losing stuff fast.

The sawp file is the first file on the first partition of the second drive. I forgot how I setup the rest of the drives, but that's not important.

Anyway, I'm done ranting now, I'm going to crawl back into my shell and wait for my replacement motherboard.

Jammrock

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Athlon 650
256 MB PC133 CAS3 from Crucial
87 GB storage from WD & IBM
Matrox G400 (it's not dead yet!)
SB Live! the original full retail, still going strong
Klipsch ProMedia v.2-400, the PC speakers that goes BOOM!
Hope Matrox releases the G800 before rebuild time, becuase the end is near!

[This message has been edited by Jammrock (edited 06 February 2001).]

[Gurm]

Multiple OS's are one of the only two REAL reasons for partitioning nowadays. The second is if you want to stream media but can't afford a second drive.

The swapfile on a separate partition is foolish. Make it static, put it at the beginning of the OS drive, and be done with it. If you can't put it on its own physical drive, you will only slow the machine down by making the hard drive navigate partitions.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[spoogenet]

Wouldn't you want the swap file to be located as far to the outside of any given platter as possible? Not sure how this would be arranged, but I would think that would give the highest transfer rates, especially since the swapfile tends to be used rather frequently by many people.

b

[Gurm]

Spooge:

Yes, you would. As to how you would arrange this... I dunno. It's likely to be different for different drives, and I for one wouldn't want to be the one with the thankless job of writing the code to keep track of it.

But that's picking nits. Just put it at the beginning of the drive (which is what DiskKeeper and SpeedDisc do, BTW).

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[cjolley]

Why not spend a little more money & raid it?
This solves all the problems.
Just stick everything on one raid 0 partition.
The begining of CDs is on the inside,
HDs on the outside.
In any event, my vote goes to no extra
partitioning at all.
Gurm is right, it just adds complications
& head movement to the system.
chuck



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ABit BE6-2 V2, P3-650@923, 256mb@142cas3, 90gig (2x45) IBM 75GXP striped raid array, SB Live Value@3.0, Pioneer 104s DVD, Mitsumi CDRW@2x2x8, Acatel 1000 ADSL@1.5mb/sec, Linksys EtherFast NIC, LG 995e, USB mouse,Matrox G400 MAX!!!!

[cjolley]

PS Arranging your swap file to be on the outside cylinders of the disk is easy....
Create a permanent swap file and put it first using Speed Disk or such.
That's all there is to it.
chuck

[Jammrock]

My swap file is static, it is on the front of the partition, thanks to Speed Disk, and putting it on the secondary drive doesn't slow it down in the slightest. No matter where you put it the hard drive will need to jump around to the swap and back (if it's even in use). By placing it on a seperate hard drive than the OS you avoid thrashing while it's accessing OS files. Well written games are pre-loaded into RAM and the swap file before the action begins, so thrashing while playing games should be a null issue for a well done setup.

Jammrock