help with partitioning my c drive

[theRealMacoy]

a friend of mine lent me a copy of nero partition magic...

i was thinking of partitioning my drive for the added speed and performance (my computer is lagging a bit these days).

i am not very well versed in the pros/cons of this procedure and could use some advice. i read the current post by pokerloco and TT's reply but was hoping for a bit more info.

i would really appreciate any help with setting up the partition and where to lay out my files (such as, i do alot of downloading and wonder where i should be downloading files into and of course where to put my PT db, etc...).

currently, i have a 30 gig hard drive, 1.8ghtz cpu and use 2 postgreSQL databases with PT.

cheers and thanks for the help,
the Real Macoy

[TheTROLL]

None of those is a reason to partition your drive. It's generally done to facilitate running multiple operating systems from a single drive.

Bear in mind that a partitioned hard drive is still only one physical drive - you won't get the performance benefits of using two separate physical drives (reading/writing simultaneously) just by partitioning your existing one.

It's something you should do to solve a specific problem, not just because someone has lent you the software to do it! To separate out your downloads/poker stuff/work stuff etc, you use directories ("folders"), not partitions.

if you re-format/re-partition your harddrive, you could erase everything on that drive so be careful.

[MrMoo]

Don't bother. There won't be any appreciable speed improvement. Think about it, your still searching the same drive. The drive head still needs to move from one area to another, whether your drive is partitioned or not.

Partitioning is good for running multiple OS's or storing your data on a different partition so that you can wipe and reinstall your OS on a frequent basis.

[MyMindIsGoing]

[ QUOTE ]
The drive head still needs to move from one area to another, whether your drive is partitioned or not.

[/ QUOTE ]

Correct. But since the data is now in a smaller space the head need to move less thus making the search faster. Having a hard drive with only one partition and having both OS and data on it is not very recomended. The drive will fastly be fragmented and there will be problems when reinstalling the OS. I would recomend a partition for the OS 5-10gb and the rest for data/download or whatever. My 200gb drive has 5gb OS, 20gb work/download/temp stuff and the rest archive (poker videos, mp3s and so on). It was done with partition magic, a very good program indeed.

[TheTROLL]

Interesting point, but in practice so much software installs DLLs/OCXs etc to your system32 directory instead of its install directory that your drive will be thrashing back and forth between the partitions for most tasks.

By all means put the OS on a separate physical drive, but the argument that keeping an OS partition separate will help doesn't hold up, largely due to poorly written/thought out installers.

[AliasMrJones]

If you really want to increase speed, particularly for your PT database, you should buy some extra drives and put tempdb and indexes onto their own disks and put your data on a raid array with at least 5 disks.

The speed increases come from having multiple disks being able to read the multiple sets of data required at the same time. I don't think you're going to see any noticeable speed increases by partitioning a single disk.

[MyMindIsGoing]

[ QUOTE ]
Interesting point, but in practice so much software installs DLLs/OCXs etc to your system32 directory instead of its install directory that your drive will be thrashing back and forth between the partitions for most tasks.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yes they do, but the install directory should be on the same parition as the os, and that partition will be the smallest on the disk and therefor have the shortest seektime. The OS and programs should be on the same partition, but the data (like poker tracker database, or your word documents) on another.

Actually til this point I have never heard anyone recomend against partitioning your drive.

[theRealMacoy]

thanks everyone for the excellent replies!

i am trying to grok all this techno speak and figure out what to do next.

cheers and thanks

the Real Macoy

[theRealMacoy]

[ QUOTE ]
If you really want to increase speed, particularly for your PT database, you should buy some extra drives and put tempdb and indexes onto their own disks and put your data on a raid array with at least 5 disks.

The speed increases come from having multiple disks being able to read the multiple sets of data required at the same time. I don't think you're going to see any noticeable speed increases by partitioning a single disk.

[/ QUOTE ]

MrJones,

your advice sounds interesting, although i am not sure exactly what you mean.

could you elaborate (in laymans terms) further regarding buying extra drives? ...i am also considering buying another hard drive instead of the partition, buy you are saying buying multiple new hard drives? ...how big should each be? ....how do you set this up?

i appologize if this is a really basic question.

the Real Macoy