any disadvantages to partitioning your drives?

[kingtrey 0]

i've always kept my harddrives partitioned, mainly so that if something happened to my OS then i could do a clean install without having to format my whole harddrive. i've never had any problems with keeping it partitioned, but i've always been curious to performance. does partitioning a drive hurt performance? i'm about to get a new harddrive in, a 40gig ATA100 7200rpm, and my current plan is to partition it with a 6gig and a 34gig, keeping my OS on the 6gig. i will also have a 20gig drive in there, which i "think" is ATA100 7200rpm, but i'm not 100% sure, which i will use for various storage and also to keep my pagefile on.

anyways, the question is will i be sacrificing performance to do this? i know that RAID would be faster, but i don't know if i want one giant partition, and then one day if i ever needed to reinstall windows i would have to screw it all up. but performance is the question here.

 

i'm running Windows 2000 SP-2 by the way.

 

 

Pentium 4 1.7ghz

ABIT TH7II-RAID

256mb PC800 RDRAM

GeForce 2 GTS 32mb DDR

SBLive!

40gig ATA100 7200rpm HD, 20gig ATA100 7200rpm HD

Pioneer Slot-10x DVD, Plextor 12/10/32a CDRW

Netgear FA310TX 10/100 NIC

Windows 2000 SP-2

[pmistry 0]

I don't think partitioning hurts performance. One thing I do notice is that disk checking and defragging take less time on partitioned drives then on 1 mammoth drive. Because of less space. The only way I can see a performance drop is in the way the disk platters are arranged on a hard disk, and you're partitions aren't evenly spaced on the platter. Can somebody clarify this for me?

[Brian Frank 0]

You will have some performance drops, but it shouldn't be enough to warrant a noticeable difference. I honestly couldn't tell you a difference. My partitioning scheme is an average of 5gigs per partition. That's average, depending on what I'm using each partition for. My game partition is 8-9 gigs, and I have a 1 gig swap partition.

It's nice if I need to reinstall Windows. Just format C and swap drive, and then install.

[AndyFair 0]

The only disadvantge I could see is if the partition table on the hard drive was damaged in some way. However, I've never, ever, seen that happen yet (touches wooden desk, just to make sure ). Let's face it, if that ever did happen, your disk drive was probably on the way out anyway!!

 

AndyF

[dcxman 0]

First of all you do not gain any performance for partioning your drive and keeping your saved personal files seperate from your OS partition because they will still share the same bandwidth capacity off that single IDE cable. If you want to enhance performance (especially for capturing video , burning CD to CD or some other mathmatical strenuous exercise for your processor) then I would have my OS setup seperately on it's own IDE cable as the primary master with no partitions and a second physical HDD for your personal stuff (preferably as the Secondary Master on the second IDE connection).

 

Hope that helps.

[pbuckne 0]

I have seen a great deal of time saved by partitioning and formating over the damaged OS, and starting over. Beating going after the whole thing. Disk access time will not be helped or hindered best I can tell.

 

More importantly, I agree heartily with moving the swap file to a different partition, as it means that it will not be spread all over a drive and fragmenting like blazes. We have seen horrible slow down when swap files range outside of a 1 gig partition.