Best way to partition HDD?

[Morten74]

Hi Guys

I'll be changing OS from XP to Win7 x64 shortly, and after some post in here about having the OS on a separate partition ensuring that the OS is placed at the edge of the drive (=higher speed), I though that might be worth a try...

I'll be using a WD 3.5" 3200AAKS 320GB, and it has to hold the OS, games, music (=iTunes) and photos. Movies and backup of music and photos will be on my NAS.

Basically I want the best performance for my OS and games (Battlefield 2 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2).

Any suggestions on how to partition the drive? -or should I just put it all on one big partition as I have now?

Thanks in advance

Best regards

Morten

[mkk]

Keep the drive as a single partition. You'll be getting an SSD system drive sooner or later anyway.

Or if you really doubt that, one partition at about 100GB for operating system and games would keep the performance-important files from mixing with the data/music.

[quest_for_silence]

Just a starting point:

http://partition.radified.com/

[alecmg]

Keep OS, programs, games on one partition; documents, media, archives on other.

[andymcca]

Keep OS, programs, games on one partition; documents, media, archives on other.

Hmm. What is the rational behind OS on the same partition with programs and games?
I like to keep my linux system files as insulated from everything else as possible.
In fact, before buying my latest drives I was running my entire /home (with all my media, documents, windows games, etc) on a single partition.
Now I have a raid-1 os, raid-0 games, and raid-1 media setup (but of course, this requires sweet linux software raid! or many disks!)

[alecmg]

Keep OS, programs, games on one partition; documents, media, archives on other.

Hmm. What is the rational behind OS on the same partition with programs and games?

First and major one is that you will have to reinstall programs and games anyway along with reinstall of windows. All of this is replaceable stuff.
Might as well format it then if needed.

Second, the hdd usage pattern for those is quite different from media disk.

Third, having more than two partitions will bite you in the ass later on.

And lastly, thats the setup I grew accustomed with in linux. Root partition and /home. Works great. Feel like experimenting with distributions, no damage is done to /home

[andymcca]

First and major one is that you will have to reinstall programs and games anyway along with reinstall of windows. All of this is replaceable stuff.
Might as well format it then if needed.

I cannot think of the last piece of software I've used which depended on the windows registry. Granted, some settings may be lost, but are there really programs incapable with coping with missing registry keys these days?

Second, the hdd usage pattern for those is quite different from media disk.

True, I do have a separate media partition!

Third, having more than two partitions will bite you in the ass later on.

? As long as you make sure to have a primary left (for a future boot partition), what could possibly go wrong? Or do you mean reallocation of space? Because this seems like much less of a problem when 95% of your data is in your huge media partition. Or perhaps you have much more varying storage requirements than I? I know I've hit the "oh crap, steam installed itself and 10gb of games on my root partition" before, but only because steam is mean.

And lastly, thats the setup I grew accustomed with in linux. Root partition and /home. Works great. Feel like experimenting with distributions, no damage is done to /home

Are you saying don't mount /home in the other distro? I actually have been exclusively using Ubuntu lately (+ wine), but my roots are with Gentoo. Perhaps the obsessive partitioning from that side of things is creeping in (to my point of view)?

Genuinely curious!
-Andy

[johnniecache7]

Keep the drive as a single partition. You'll be getting an SSD system drive sooner or later anyway.

Or if you really doubt that, one partition at about 100GB for operating system and games would keep the performance-important files from mixing with the data/music.

SSD is highly overated,expensive and don't have reliable controllers yet.Why would he spend that kind of money when he could get WD Black or Samsung F3 1TB and WD 2TB green for the price one reasonably sized SSD.

[ilovejedd]

SSD is highly overated,expensive and don't have reliable controllers yet.Why would he spend that kind of money when he could get WD Black or Samsung F3 1TB and WD 2TB green for the price one reasonably sized SSD.

Yeah, because hard drives never fail... Seriously, I think SSDs nowadays are pretty reliable (at least the Intel drives I've used are). However, I would delay purchase by a couple of months for a doubling of capacity at current price points.

[alecmg]

I cannot think of the last piece of software I've used which depended on the windows registry. Granted, some settings may be lost, but are there really programs incapable with coping with missing registry keys these days?

For me it sounds wild that you reinstall windows without reinstalling programs. Stemming from common reasons why you do a reinstall in the first place When $**t gets tangled up for unknown reasons, you want to eliminate those reasons by starting from scratch

having more than two partitions will bite you in the ass later on

Its just that I regretted more than once that I went for separate partitions. And yes, steam is mean.

Are you saying don't mount /home in the other distro?

No, exactly opposite. I trust linux to reuse the config files from /home without screwing it up.