Partition Question

[KBD]

I'm planning on upgrading my hard drives soon, i'm prolly gonna sell my Raptor 150GB and get 2 36 GB 16MB Cache Raptors for RAID 0 or just buy another 150GB Raptor again for RAID 0. I'd like to know how to best partion the 2 drives in RAID to get the most performance out my drives/system. Am i better off just making one partition for the OS and leave it at that or should i make a few, one for OS, one for programs, games etc? Which combo will be giving the best performonce. Most likely will be using Norton Partition Magic 8 as i got for free, but i welcome other suggestions.

 

[ktr]

What I would do is make a 4-5GB partition in the start of the HDD dedicated for virtual memory (page). Therefore you are allocating the fastest portion of your HDD to the most used resources. For the rest, just have one partition. Spiting the HDD may ruin performance for the software who are at the end of the HDD.

 

[KBD]

So if i undertood you correctly i just need a single partition for the page file and that is it.

BTW, why do people make partitions for OS, is that supposed to help, i heard somewhere that it does?

 

[ktr]

So if i undertood you correctly i just need a single partition for the page file and that is it.

That is what I do. Its kinda like linux, where it uses the an entire partition as page (know in linux as swap).

BTW, why do people make partitions for OS, is that supposed to help, i heard somewhere that it does?

Mostly for multi OS booting purposes and organization of data.

 

[smig]

I mostly partition my HD for 3-4 partitions. it's makes orgenizing things easier for me. espacially if you want to share over the network.
I recommend creating a special partition for all your data. I don't put the "my document" folder in it, since this folder contain a lot of data (mostly from games) that I normaly don't want to back up.

 

[Mussels]

i make one partition for OS, and a second for games.

Any data i want backed up goes on another HDD, preferably external or on another machine entirely - partitions wont save you from a failed HDD, as both/all partitions can go with it.

 

[DaedalusHelios]

velociraptor will be out anyday now.

Just get one of those.

 

[smig]

i make one partition for OS, and a second for games.

Any data i want backed up goes on another HDD, preferably external or on another machine entirely - partitions wont save you from a failed HDD, as both/all partitions can go with it.

external HD or one on a nother machine is not fall tolerant.
this is why I decided to go for a RAID-1 lately. I know it's a waste of HD space, but these ones are not expensive these days.

but, me too, like to have one partition for the system, another one for games and aplications, and another one for data - documents, music, video... not for saved games.

BTW - if you want to easy clean your HD from garbage I suggest to create a TEMP directory under C: (C:\Temp) and change the system to use this directory. from time to time go into this folder and clear it.

 

[Mussels]

external HD or one on a nother machine is not fall tolerant.
this is why I decided to go for a RAID-1 lately. I know it's a waste of HD space, but these ones are not expensive these days.

but, me too, like to have one partition for the system, another one for games and aplications, and another one for data - documents, music, video... not for saved games.

BTW - if you want to easy clean your HD from garbage I suggest to create a TEMP directory under C: (C:\Temp) and change the system to use this directory. from time to time go into this folder and clear it.

its fault tolerant enough, as i only turn the backup drive on once a month or so, it basically has no use-time to fail. if its only on 2 hours a month, the drive will last years.

 

[KBD]

Guys, thnx for the responses. I forgot to mention that in addition to 2 Raptors in RAID i also have a second hard drive (a 320 GB 7200.10 Barracuda) for games, storage and etc. I intend to keep it and continue using it for those purposes. I also have an external HDD that use to backup data, so i have my data in 2 places: on the second HDD and the external. That way there is a very small chance of both failing at the same time and me losing my data.

I may go with velociraptors if they are the top dog, when are they coming out?

I'm getting a lot of opnions is regards to partition here. ktr thinks that partitioning the page file is all i need. Others think that i may need more, one for OS, games etc. Using partitions purely for organization i don't really need, i have everything very well organized as it is. I need it to improve performance of the RAID array. I know little about partitions (thats why brought this up) but from i read here it seems to me that a page file partition is what i need to get a performance boost. If i'm wrong then tell me why.

 

[Mussels]

it wont give a speed boost, merely stop the page file fragmenting. its more of a measure to make teh speed of a fresh OS last longer.

 

[KBD]

I see, thnx. I'm currently using Diskeeper Pro and it has that very feature in it, it defragments the page file and hard disks. So i assume that i don't need the page file partition then nor do i need any other kind of partition since all it does is organizes files and doesn't increase performance.

 

[Mussels]

I see, thnx. I'm currently using Diskeeper Pro and it has that very feature in it, it defragments the page file and hard disks. So i assume that i don't need the page file partition then nor do i need any other kind of partition since all it does is organizes files and doesn't increase performance.

earlier parts of a hard drive are faster than the outside, so in theory a smaller partition at the front will be faster at the end.

Then again, the defrag program i use (O&O) has a feature to keep the most accessed files at the start of the drive... again making partitioning useless.

The ONLY reason i partition, is so that if i need to format, i lose less data.

 

[KBD]

Thnx for being helpful & explaining this stuff

 

[ktr]

^^^ yea, that is the concept behind it. It is a known fact that the outside of the HDD spins about ~15 mb/s faster than the inside. So given it to the page should allow faster caching of data.