Hi all, It's time to install a new harddrive. The 40 gig drive I have now has no partitions. My computer guru always breaks his drives into 3 or 4 partitions.
What are the advantages or disadvantages of partitons? Thanks, Mike
I've gone both ways, but now have settled on having just ONE partition.
If you make a separate partition for Windows, you get into situations where the windows updater says it doesnt have enough space to download an SP2 update, cuz it only looks on C:, which only has 98 MB free, it completely ignores D: with 198 GIGABYTES free.
Same thing with several programs that blindly make scratch files in c:\\TMP and other hard-wired C: places.
I find it best to create two partitions for windows- one for programs and operating system, and one for user data - this way if you ever need to format and reinstall, you dont have to worry too much about your data. Sometimes I like to add a 3-4Gb partition and dedicate it soley to temporary and swap files.
There's nothing wrong with just having one big partition however - it's down to user preference.
On my linux system however, I've got tonnes of partitions, but that's a different story
Mark.
Depends on how you use your PC. If you just run it and are not bothered about performance then a single partition is probably the least hassle.
Me - I always limit the C: drive to 50GB, this means producing and storing a clone of my OS drive with all my important apps is of manageable size - then when the HD crashes I can install a new HD and be up and running inside an hour.
Also it makes defragging the OS drive much quicker which is important to get the max performance out of your machine. And finally a virus scan of your OS drive will be much quicker.
I normally would partition a 200GB in to four 50GB partitions. One for the c: or OS drive, one for all my data, one for all my multimedia/films/mp3's, and one to store all my uninstalled applications on - I dont use more than around 15 applications at any one time - so I uninstall unused ones and can try new ones very quickly.
Just my tuppence worth!
Slurp
Oh really? *raises eyebrow*
Where do you get your hard drives - from the dumpster? I haven't had a crash since around 1990 and that was on a very old RLL drive on an XT! As far As I can tell, the only things that ever wears out is the software ;-)
-- Joe Legris
-- it happens. I have lost 2 drives over the last 10 years, both Maxtor's - both bought new.
I think 3 partitions makes more sense.
The first is where the OS lives The second is for your data etc The third is for a complete copy of the first when the system is working.
This way, with a live CD or DVD or even a floppy, you can put back the working copy of the OS with a disk cloner.
-- -- kensmith@rahul.net forging knowledge
----------8
In my time, i've installed and uninstalled the odd one or two bits of software which were so badly written that they've managed to completely trash the hard disk. I've also experienced hard disk corruption from repeated power failures. Having a working backup of your system can be a god-send ;)
Maxtor *shudder* I think next to fujitsu, these are the second most problematic drives i've come across in 8 years as a computer tech. OK they used to be good, but they seemed to go downhill pretty fast about 4 years ago.
Mark
I hate to tell you, but the more recent the drive manufacture date, the shorter the lifetime (approximately). As far as software wearing out,you forgot to use a bit bucket!
Roughly from 20 years ago to 10 years ago, Maxtor drives refused to work with any other drive - including Maxtors of a different vintage. Using different controllers for each drive was of no help. Because of that, i have refused to buy or even accept them as a freebie. The best drives were those made by Quantum, and on hearing that (1) they were going to *sell out* and (2) to the worst makers Maxtor, i got rather pissed to say the least. Too bad i did not have 10 million dollars or so to prevent that disastor.
My experience too. I've *never* had a Quantum system disk fail on me.
I just hope Maxtor learnt some good stuff from buying them.
Graham
That was my experience too. Untill about 1998. There was a series that had a very high failure rate. 2GB to 6GB models.
-Mike
IMHO better organisation of files & other stuff
I agree & recommend that also! I use w98seLite with a bunch of small progs & utilities; I have not reinstalled from skratch for more than 5y, just few times restored from backUp! My sistem on C:\ is less than 1GB in total ...
I advise min. 3 partitions (max.5 of them) : system (+progs), data , trash one (swap & temp + iNet temp & other temp not important stuff) & I have than also archive partition & last setup one (copy of setups for win & progs etc.) [3 x 2GB + 8GB + 4GB] on 20GB drive.
My experience:
Recently my HD started to develop some bad sectors on 1st & 3rd partition few times (I also have another HD out of the box to back up entire drive) & crashed the system, so had to implement & use Spinrite (or HDregenerator) to fix the stuff ...
after formatting those two problematic partitions, Spinrite took almost 2 hours to fix (remaping) bad sectors for only 2GB of space. You can imagine how much it would take for few tenth GB partitions or drive! Someone would need also an Ups to be sure not to interrupt Spinrite running if some short power outage occurs! (& be w/o PC few days too)
It happened 2 times already on both only those partitions in few last months; if happens more, I will just hide those partitions & repartition the 4th one & repace system & data from back up ... ... till I get cheaply some 40GB HD not runnning hot & silent one to replace it & copy previous one to it ... (than I plan to double space on those partitions) these days is already to find so small HD a dificulty ...
I wonder why people do not make more often back Ups on CDR or DVD-R or onto external HD (not connected all the time for security reasons). ... & than panic in case of data loss & system crash or hardware failure (quite often), especially if having NTFS formated HD ...
... I use this mine system (at the end of page) if stuff crashes:
-- Regards , SPAJKY ® mail addr. @ my site @
In my experience, i've had the least problems with seagate - although havent they been bought out by someone else now? Quantum used to be very good yes - although I did start witnessing a radpid increase in faults with quantum... co-incidently shortly after maxtor bought them out!
When I was working in a computer workshop last year, I undertook the task of destroying some customer drives (in compliance with our disposal policy). My favourite method of doing this was to open up the drive, power it up, wipe a hard disk magnet over the surface of the disk, then scratch the surface of the disk deeply with a sharp tool as much as possible... invite the other technicians to join in. and finally give it a bloody good whacking with a hammer.
Well this one day I had a maxtor 40Gb drive, and on hitting the platter with a hammer it shattered into about 152,251,234 pieces. i shit myself and our aged printer engineer nearly had a heart attack. Bloody thing was made of glass :\
Mark
With hard drives with very large capacities there is nothing to fear about loss of space, unless you are very much in audio and video collections.
If you use Win98SE have 4 gb as the primary C partition, cleanup temp files regularly. If you have enough memory disable the swap file, whatever others may say, this does not affect performance in any way.
Divide the balance into three or four partitions to store your data and other stuff. And always create a backup periodically.
-- Sandy Archer Reply to newsgroup only For links to Harddisk management freeware http:/members.tripod.com/~diligent/harddisk.htm ***
Unless you have gigs of ram (which win98 wont support properly anyway) It will seriously affect performance.
I *STRONGLY* suggest that you do *not* use "double space" !! You are just asking for Major Disastor and General Fuckup! A 120Gbyte HD is rather cheap these daze; pricing of some of those large drives is so crazy that you might as well as buy a large inexpensive drive even if you need only 10 Megabytes for everything in DOS. I know of a business that has done that for the last 10 years, and their system never goes down; their competitors in the same county uses Windoze, continually have downtime problems - and their software costs about 20 times as much or more.
!!Absolutely! Backup, backup and when in doubt backup. Best way to do that in terms of cost and speed is to buy a second HD of the same size, then get a removeable HD kit to use so you can plug in the second drive for making an exact copy oon occasion. Unplug when not using computer for normal use; keep in safe place. If a business, put it in a fire-rated safe (locked most of the time).
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