Maxtor 120G 8MB buffer

[Charles]

I usually never partition my hard drives but they are not more than 20G.

How would you partition 120G drive? 20Gig partitions?

[RJ]

It's a personal decision really. The only recommendation is to have separate partitions for OS and data, so if you need to reinstall the OS you can do that without affecting your data.
That means 2 partitions. And that's how I have partitioned my hard drive. C: for OS and D: for data.

Some people have their MP3, or documents on a separate partition, or separate installed programs from OS, or application from games.
It depends on you. If it was me, I'd put 2 partitions on it. A 20 GB and a 100 GB one.

RJ

[Charles]

What about the issue with defragmenting the 100GB. How long would it take to defrag the 100GB partition?

[RJ]

Depends on how much it is fragmented. I need about 20 to 30 minutes for a defrag.
As long as you don't need all the performance of the hard drive (i.e. for games, or video capturing etc.) you can also do that in the background.
It's not the same like with Win9x anymore.

RJ

[RodneyMargis]

i have that drive i got it for christmas. i iddnt partition it. it only takes 15 to 20minutes to defrag it. its really quite

[TwoRails]

Hi Charles,

My tact is a little different than RJ's, but as stated, it really is a personal decision. I break it up into catagories, like for the OS, video, photos, data, word prcession, etc.

I like the OS logical drive small to save on cluster size, so anywhere up to a 8GB partition suits me just fine. My "movie editing" drive I keep larger, over 32GB, as the cluster size doesn't change anymore and the files are large. All else is fitted as needed between the above "mins" and "max" cluster size ranges for a FAT 32 system.

For a detailed break down on cluster sizes, see:

http://www.pcmech.com/show/harddrive/53/

Oh.. and on defrag times and such, it makes a big difference on how much is actually stored on the partitions, but you will experience quicker defrag times when the "stuff" is spread out over multipartitions.

HTH

TwoRails

[glc]

TR's statements definitely apply to FAT32 on Win9x, but NTFS is a different animal. Cluster size is a nonissue and defragging is done in the background without interfering with work.

[Charles]

Sounds good. I'll try the 20/100.