New Hard Drive and Partitions

[bobby-jo]

Im thinking about getting a new hard drive (my 80 Gig is filling up)
What is the Best way to partition the two to give best performance, ive looked at this site n its given me a rough idea:

http://www.aumha.org/a/parts.htm

i do have a few questions tho...does it matter if the 'My Docs' Partition is not on the same drive as Windows?
Does it matter what order the partitions are it? obviously windows must be on the primary disk, n it will be the first partition.

Cheers guys!! :D

[TwoRails]

It was / is more important, space wise, to make logical drives (partitions) when FAT32 (or lower) was king. NTFS is becoming increasingly more common and with it's 4KB cluster size, it is already efficient on space usage.

That said, I still break up my drives. I use a logical drive for the OS, and others depending on usage (games, temp / trash stuff, databases, photos, etc...). One reason is that it helps keep things organized. Another reason is that defragging the (logical) drives goes a lot faster, and you only need to defrag drives you've used. Also, if one drive develops a problem, you don't lose the whole physical drive.

I keep "My Documents" on my small (15GB) C drive as I keep that stuff in other directories and drives, but no, it doesn't have to be on the same drive as Windows. I do keep my email and Internet cache on a different drive along with my "temp" directory. My 'My Doc' directory is only 1/2 GB in size on the C drive, but like I said, I don't use it much. My digital photos are scattered over several logical drives and each directory is about 2 - 8GB. One drive has 40GB of home movies. And, of course, I install all programs somewhere else other than C drive.

HTH

TwoRails

[bobby-jo]

That does help, thanks.

does the Internet Cache come under the 'Temp' folders in windows?

Heres a rough idea of what ive got so far:

Drive 1 (80Gb)
Windows on C
Programs - straight after C
swap file
temp

Drive 2 (250Gb)
Games
My Docs
Music
etc

How dus that look? any thing else u can suggest?

[TwoRails]

I would split the first drive up into two. C drive would be about 15 - 20 GB for the OS and what I call direct OS related stuff (drivers / software for the sound card, vid card, printers, scanners, antivirus, firewall, etc.) I would Not put any "regular" programs on C drive, they'd all go to a different logical drive (graphics programs, editors, office stuff, etc). I would keep the swap file right on the C drive.

The second physical drive I would still split up into manageable chucks; 3 or maybe 4. That'll give you 4 or 5 more logical drives (including the second part of the first physical drive).

[glc]

The more partitions you have, the more confusing things get. You need to achieve a reasonable balance. I never use multiple partitions on customers' machines unless they specifically want them.

I'd probably do it the way you have proposed - the simple way to do it is just install Windows on the 80 gig, partition and format the 250 gig, then right click on My Documents and select Properties - then Move it to the 250 gig. It will move My Documents and all its subfolders (My Music, My Pictures, etc.) to the other drive - and preserve all links from all programs that use that structure. I'd install all software except maybe games to the main drive - if you have to wipe and reload the OS they all have to be reinstalled anyway.

I've never seen the need to create dedicated temp and swapfile partitions - I simply make the swapfile a fixed size so it doesn't become fragmented.

In order to install programs on anything other than C, you have to change the path each time, or edit the registry to change the default path. This is frankly not worth it to me - each install has to install system files on C anyway (like in \windows\system32) and make registry entries. If you have ample free space on the 250, what you could do is after everything is installed and running well, just create an image of C and store it on the big drive - and if Windows goes ballistic on you and you want to reformat, just reformat the 80 gig then restore the image - you will be back in business in a jiffy.