Is it necessary to partition your drives?

0	I have a backup computer here and I partitioned my drive into 4. Is it healthy to partition it as such and use it heavily (as in the computer is never turned off). hard healthy partition drive windows7 parts asked Feb 11 '12 at 12:15 DJ Scooby Doo 9.5k●232●279●380

9 Answers:

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it is only better for performance on c drive if you have a large drive. you will not gain any performance increase by partitioning other drivers. if you have a folder you would like to see in computer there are programs for mounting folders in computer just like the folder is a drive.

answered Feb 11 '12 at 21:03

Dr Giggles
331●5●7

1	It's better in terms of speed and organization, yes. answered Feb 11 '12 at 16:45 Angelwork 561●36●37●50

0	I would prefer to use 4 separate (physical) drives. If that 1 drive fails all your data on all 4 partitions will be lost unless you have backed the data backed up someplace else. answered Feb 11 '12 at 21:04 Lestat611 2.1k●93●110●133

i agree always have a back of of everything on various drives on one master backup. in the image you see backups - utorrent, documents - wallpaper, downloads - music, movives - tv - video all of these drives are backed up onto the one labled universal backups. the vm is just a partition for the universal drive.

computer

answered Feb 11 '12 at 21:16

Dr Giggles
331●5●7

0	Why not just folder it all? /video /audio /pics /files /porn /downloads If you defrag once in a while you will be fine. It is what I do on a 5TB RAID. answered Feb 11 '12 at 22:00 Jackster1337 8.5k●178●214●300 /porn, looool (Feb 11 '12 at 22:11) DJ Scooby Doo

0	No real need, I have five drives in my system and have had no real reason to do this. answered Feb 12 '12 at 09:50 Xiro 4.4k●37●54●103

0	the only drive you should defrag is c. regardless of claims you are asking for problems defraging other drives. answered Feb 12 '12 at 15:47 Dr Giggles 331●5●7

If you use a HDD then partitioning is very useful. for example, if you have a 1TB drive and have it mostly full, it will take extremely long to defrag and perform other maintenance, but if you were to partition it to 150GB for drive C then the rest to drive D, then you can store bulk data, (eg movies, music and various other stuff, while your program and other IO sensitive data is stored on drive C)

II do this and it allows me to quickly defrag regularly ( I do a disk defragdaily (eg if you are about to go shower, then start a disk defrag before you go). Then later on, eg if you are heading out somewhere and will be gone for a few hours, start a virus scan, and also have other programs such as malwarebytes run their scans.

With an SSD, there is no need to partition for performance reasons as fragmentation does not effect performance (the data on NAND flash is written in a way that creates as much fragmentation as possible so that each cell has an equal chance at getting used. The data layout that a defragger will see is basically completely fake as it does not represent where data is located on the SSD

answered Feb 12 '12 at 17:28

Razor512
15.6k●34●80●242

first you should only defrag c once a month at most. defragging too often will cause just as many problems as not defragging at all. as for scanning for virus, rootkit, trojans, spyware, etc... setup a weekly auto-scan of c, everything stored on your other drives should of been scanned when it was downloaded, therefore no need to scan those items again. as far as ssd drives are concerned they do not need to be defragged. if possible only partition c if you plan to make it a multi-boot drive. do not store anything on c that you do not want to loose if you can.

(Feb 12 '12 at 18:09) Dr Giggles

never seen any issues with defragging frequently. Windows it's self (since XP does some minor idle time defragging)

Many tools designed to maintain low fragmentation levels will defrag when ever the system has been idle for a few minutes. (while those tools are not ideal since they take up resources that could be better put to use running your applications.

The main goal of defragging is to increase the IOPS of a HDD. and the more linear reads the hard drive can do, the higher the IOPS can be overall, especially when it comes to small reads and writes (eg 4K). I still use a HDD as my main drive, and a SSD (120GB sandisk SSD (111GB usable) as a secondary drive for a select few applications and games.

While it is much faster than my 1TB drive, the size is a bit small to waste a large portion of it installing windows on it (and it doesn't make much of a bootup improvement to warrant taking up the space (windows XP boots in about 14 seconds to a state where there is no additional loading and is 100% ready to go using my 1TB WD black drive)(the sandforce controller has idle garbage collection so while not as good as TRIM, it does work)

I will eventually upgrade to an SSD for the OS install when I can get a SSD around 256GB SATA 6gb/s (or better depending on how long it takes), that is around $160 or less and has more reliable NAND that can handle a decent number of read/ writes (instead of the current MLC that dies after 40-80TB of data has been written to it) (I currently don't care if my SSD dies because it will just mean that I have to RMA it then have steam redownload everything, along with reinstalling photoshop and adobe aftereffects and utorrent (the db file in utorrent is IO intensive and benefits greatly from the SSD)

(Feb 12 '12 at 20:07) Razor512

I think it's misleading telling people to partition without evidence it'll help. I'm happy using an unpartioned 1.5tb drive. I think it's down to personal preference. I prefer having a folder with all my documents in on one partition than a million partitions that do the same thing

answered Feb 12 '12 at 20:10

Taz155
191●16●21●27

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