Do you partition your drives?

[Yaboze]

I was just wondering what some of you guys do with your HD's. Suppose you just bought 2 new big WD's or Seagates, 320GB or whatever, do you split up the drive? I know some people still buy Raptors as the OS drive C: and just get a large drive for the rest. Maybe a drive for games, one for music, etc.

I was just curious what you guys do.

I might be buying 2 new drives soon and wanted some ideas.

[Dragunov]

MY big 640GB drive is split up in two drives, one for Vista and one for backup, my other drive is just as is for XP

[Redeemed]

I used to do that, but anymore it's too much of a hassle. I just get one big drive and dump everything on that. :p

But, I am looking to purchase a couple 1TB hard drives and hook 'em up to our network here. They'd be 100% backup for all the computers in my house. 2TB should last us quite a while. :D

[tjohn]

I have 2 WD250's 1 has vista64 and 1 has xp32, both 1 partition

[lduguay]

I triple boot, so 3 partitions ;)

[ASUSEN7900GTX]

i have my 2x250gb samsung´s split to 4 partitions one xp second on that disk games backup
vista and one back up

[grey_1]

3 drives, soon to be single partition each.

[einstein_314]

I've got 2 partitions on my main rig. On 2 separate drives. One for boot and programs, one for documents.

[grey_1]

Is it really true that some apps will actually perform better installed to a non-OS partition or drive?

[nekrosoft13]

4 hard drives

C partition = Vista = drive 1
D partition = Programs/My Documents = drive 2
E partition = scrap drive/temporary video encoding drive = drive 1
F partition = Games = drive 1
G partition = Games2 = drive 2
H partition = temp video drive before re-encode = drive 2
I partition = download location = drive 3
J partition = empty, sometimes used for video storage before re-encode = drive 3
K partition = holding area for files\drivers\programs etc.. = drive 4

[XDanger]

4 hard drives
K partition = holding area for files\drivers\programs etc.. = drive 4
I like that holding area idea, My downloads folder must fragment the hell out of my drives

[ATOJAR]

I have my 500GB drive in two, i have it partitioned in a 100GB for vista, programs & games ect & i have the other 400GB for storage, movies, music, games, game saves, program setups & pictures ect, also all my downloads go straight to the 400GB drive.

[dxx]

Is it really true that some apps will actually perform better installed to a non-OS partition or drive?

No.

Consider the theory behind it. By changing the location on a disk where an application is stored, you can only alter one charactoristic of an app's performance, and that's its performance when relating to disk usage. That's to say, a game won't run any smoother, since nothing affecting the CPU is affected by repartitioning, but loading performance may change, since the data will physically be stored on a different area on the disk. Whether the performance change will be positive or negative depends on how the drive is partitioned and where the data files are placed by any reasonably intelligent data defragmention apps. Windows' defrag'er, for example, will attempt to move frequently-accessed data to fast areas of a disk. If the fastest area of a disk isn't within a partition's bounds, partitioning the disk will actually degrade performance. Partitioning the drive in such a way that the game gets the fastest portion of the disk could feasibly bring some gains, but at the expense of the OS, and probably other things too.

Ultimately, any differences there are in performance are probably going to be unnoticable anyway, so it doesn't really matter. Mind out, even the slowest areas of a modern drive can read at around 50MB/s, so it's not going to be slow in any case.

[breathemetal]

nope

[crainger]

I have 2x500 gb in RAID0 as one big partition. This has Vista and games etc. I have a second HDD for XP, backups and Vista's swapfile. That's all I do.

[rage10]

I have a 120 and a 250 gig. each has a thirty gig partition at the beginning for an os I currently have one. I made the second just in case.

drive one:
30 gigs os, 90 gigs music, video clips and apps.

drive two: 30 gigs empty space I use for downloads and file swapping 210 gigs for games.

and no it wont make your pc go any faster but it makes it easier to find things.

[K007]

4HDDs, 7 Partitions...-.-.

[K007]

4HDDs', 7 Partitions :O

[K007]

4HDDs', 7 Partitions :O

[K007]

4HDDs', 7 Partitions :O

[grey_1]

QUADRUPLE POST! A little excited over yer partitions there K007? :p

[K007]

wtf...-.-...i hit post and it just lagged

[nekrosoft13]

QUADRUPLE POST! A little excited over yer partitions there K007? :p

one per each hdd ;)