DOES PARTITIONING TO IMPROVE PERFORMANCE?

Question

I just purchased a 9100 with a Maxtor 250GB drive.Would partitioning it improve performance? Are there other benefits?

SleepEKat · Answer

From what I understand, partitioning is just another term for 'splitting up'. If you partition your hard drive, you simply will have one hard drive acting as 2. There are no performance benefits, unless you consider installing another OS on one of the partitions to increase performance for certain applications. Try redhat linux. I used that at school and it was pretty interesting. I'm sure there are free versions of Linux available. Personally, I never looked too deep into it. I'm more of an engineering nerd than a computer geek.

Rem3006 · Answer

Well actually, partitioning can give some slight degree of speed but the real value is in organization.

Let's say you partition your 250gb drive to a C: 50gb and a D: 200gb. C drive will be the boot drive and progams should be installed there. The 'D' drive can be your data drive where you keep audio, video, data, etc.

When you run a program on the C drive the CPU only has to search a 50gb drive instead of a 250gb. Same goes for the D drive. This can make backups easier, too.

Having rambled on, I don't think you will really notice any difference in performace, just some mental gain in organization.

EFVincent · Answer

You'll also get a significant performance benefit from avoiding excess fragmentation. I create partitions based on the type of access. Highly volatile files, like video editing, music, processing RAW digital images with photoshop, anything that requires 'scratch' disks - they will all cause a volume to very quickly become very fragmented.   If you keep that stuff away from you system volume, and then move stuff like 'my documents', 'my music', etc., and you temporary internet files off of your system volume, that volume will fragment more slowly and your system will have better apparent performance.   While you're at it, create a fixed size paging file somewhere. A paging file controlled by Windows can change size, which means fragmentation.   Don't underestimate the cost of fragmentation. It's a top reason for computers that seem to slow down as they get older until they're finally almost unusable.

Rem3006 · Answer

You can defrag easily by opening Explorer, Right Click on the drive, Properties and Tools.  If the drive is large it can take several hours.

Storage, Drives & Media

DOES PARTITIONING TO IMPROVE PERFORMANCE?

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