HDD partitioning help with 500gb.

[Geronemo]

Hi,
after reading many good reviews i got a seagate momentus xt 500gb for my laptop which currently runs on win xp, 250 gb 5400 rpm hdd.

Now i would be installing win 7 in this new drive.

are they any tips that i should follow in terms of HDD partitioning etc that would help increase performance of the HDD or should i just have one partition with everything in it.

Please let me know and any tip would be helpful.

thank you

[naton]

There have been a lot of debates about HDD partitioning. In terms of performance there is no much difference between a harddrive with one and multiple partitions. That said I personally always partition my harddrive. I create a minimum of three partitions; one for Windows and programs (this is the C:\ partition), one for my files and documents (D:\ partition), and a 6 to 8GB partition that I use for the paging file.

Keeping Windows and your files separate help if you need to re-install Windows, since you can safely format the C:\ partition knowing that your files are safe in the D:\ partition

[tilleroftheearth]

Partitioning?

Oh yeah!

See:
Partitioning for Performance: Hitachi 7K500 Benchmark Setup Specifics


Especially when combined with moving the whole Users directory (Win7) like this link hints at:

See:
Move Windows 7 User folder and ProgramData folder to separate drive or partition


While you don't have to go all out (with 5 partitions) to get noticeable performance increases from partitioning, I would recommend at least two partitions: C: O/S and programs (max 100GB) and DATA (rest of the drive).

A 'power tip' is that once you have the partitions, the O/S and the programs all setup, simply 'shrink' the C: partition to have just around 20GB free space on C: drive. This will give you the most responsive system possible. The best part is that if you need more capacity later, you can simply 'extend' the O/S partition without having to re-install the O/S again.

Yeah, the 'power tip' may be wasting some HDD capacity, but the increased performance and the ease of giving the O/S or program drive back any needed space in the future so easily more than offsets losing 10% or so of the drive for a 'just in case' scenario.

Hope this helps.

[Geronemo]

thanks for the tip guys

Partitioning?

While you don't have to go all out (with 5 partitions) to get noticeable performance increases from partitioning, I would recommend at least two partitions: C: O/S and programs (max 100GB) and DATA (rest of the drive).

A 'power tip' is that once you have the partitions, the O/S and the programs all setup, simply 'shrink' the C: partition to have just around 20GB free space on C: drive. This will give you the most responsive system possible. The best part is that if you need more capacity later, you can simply 'extend' the O/S partition without having to re-install the O/S again.

Yeah, the 'power tip' may be wasting some HDD capacity, but the increased performance and the ease of giving the O/S or program drive back any needed space in the future so easily more than offsets losing 10% or so of the drive for a 'just in case' scenario.

Hope this helps.

You mentioned in your partitioning post that temp partition should be the first partition, my question is that is the 1st partition suppose to be the fastest partition or fastest part of disk?

Secondly regarding the power tip, you're suggesting that i make the main C:\ partition 100GB and after installing everything "shrink" the partition, How do i do that?

Keeping Windows and your files separate help if you need to re-install Windows, since you can safely format the C:\ partition knowing that your files are safe in the D:\ partition

What's the significance of a pagefile and having it on a different drive.

Thanks a lot

[tilleroftheearth]

The first partition you make on a HDD will automatically be on the fastest (outermost part) of the disk.

To 'shrink' a partition on Win7; right click on Computer, select Manage, select Disk Management and right click on the partition you want to shrink.

A pagefile is needed by Windows (period) to ensure that the O/S and/or programs don't run out of RAM (basically; it is 'virtual RAM'). However, with 8GB RAM (or higher), most users with common/average usage patterns could effectively turn off the pagefile to not only save HDD/SSD space, but to also increase their systems performance (slightly).

Having a pagefile on a seperate partition on the same physical drive is not a performance benefit, overall. Putting it on the fastest/first partition of a second, physical HDD is. Having enough RAM to disable the pagefile completely is still the fastest experience though (assuming your usage patterns don't demand more than the maximum amount of physical RAM you have in your system).

Hope this helps too.

[Geronemo]

ok, i have come to the following conclusion and help me out if i am wrong.

I am planning on making 2 partitions:

C: OS and apps (100GB) just like you pointed out.
D: user data including downloads, docs etc. (whatever is left of 500GB)

Now this is what you mentioned in your hitachi post:

Click into the MYDATA folder and then, open another instance of Computer. In the Computer window, click on C: drive, click on Users and finally click on your user name ('ED' in this example). Now, select all folders except Downloads and AppData (if you have show hidden folders turned on), right click and drag the selected folders into our MYDATA folder on D: drive. Release the mouse button and in the menu that appears, select 'Move here'.

In the MYDATA window, navigate to your T: drive, (Temp partition), right click the Downloads folder, drag it to the root of the T: drive (Temp partition), release the mouse button and select 'Move here'.

I take it that move user folder and programdata folder should be a better alternative than the above method, right?

Also one more thing i am worried about is that if my OS will be on c:\ and data folder is on d:\, that means my temp and download folder would end up on two different drives as you mentioned in you hitachi post:

But, why are the Downloads on the same partition as where we have our environment Temp/TMP variables pointed to?

This is because Windows will always download to those Temp/TMP variables and then move the downloaded files to our Downloads directory. When these different directories are on the same partition as we have done here, then it is simply a matter of Windows changing a directory pointer and small and large files will be 'moved' between the folders instantly. If we were to have our Temp and Download folders on different partitions, small downloads may not bother us, but if we downloaded a large (GB sized) file, we would not only have to wait for the download, but then we would have to wait while Windows moves it from the Temp folder on one partition to the Downloads folder on another

What i am trying to ask is that i want all user data including download, docs, desktop, fav, music, video, pics etc on D:\ and moving temp folder to this drive should make the system faster as the system won't have to copy files from C:\win\temp to d:\temp right?

How to move temp to D:\ just drag and move or something else?

Thanks

[James D]

Don't move Temp folder to D. Let them stay on C. Right click on My comp. > Properties> Advanced Properties> And the little button on the right bottom of opened Window.

I gonna have SSD soon. I didn't even know that I won't be able to move USER folders on another HDD. I will have to read all in that link. Ohhhhhh. I wish it was in English.

[tilleroftheearth]

Geronemo,

You're correct: moving the Users folder with the link I provided is superior to the old tutorial I wrote (too long ago).

Not only will it move ALL the users folders to a different partition, it will also move the temp folders too - in addition to the Public folders which in my experience are impossible to move/redirect in any other way.

So, in the end, you will have your O/S and program partition and all your data will be saved in your second partition.

Hope this clears that up for you.

[James D]

Ok, I read it. I can say that don't how it was in the past but at this moment Windows easily lets me to choose every location I want, even another computer on netwok. Don't know anything about Public folders though

[Geronemo]

Geronemo,

You're correct: moving the Users folder with the link I provided is superior to the old tutorial I wrote (too long ago).

Not only will it move ALL the users folders to a different partition, it will also move the temp folders too - in addition to the Public folders which in my experience are impossible to move/redirect in any other way.

So, in the end, you will have your O/S and program partition and all your data will be saved in your second partition.

Hope this clears that up for you.

thanks for clarifying.
I Haven't installed Win on any machine for a good 7-8 yrs now.
Yesterday got stuck on "cannot boot from cd code 5 error"

Finally ran disk part and copied all files to a usb drive.
Hope all goes well with the installation