Hard Drives.
 

My question is do I partition or not? I have a 300GB SATA150 drive waiting to go in my PC ready for a clean Windows XP installation. The old 160GB IDE will be going into another PC.

If I should partition, how many and what sizes?

Re: Hard Drives.
 

300 at 1gb each :) was that what was in my vestibule earlier ??

Re: Hard Drives.
 

Yes. Thats why I did not tell you. You might have kept it :D

Re: Hard Drives.
 

partition or not to partition...?

NO

Re: Hard Drives.
 

Yes,
At least seperate your OS/Programs from your data. That way if/when you want to reinstall/upgrade your OS your data is kept seperate and doesn't get touched when you trash the OS partition. I would assume you are using NTFS as well, If you are using FAT32 you could end up with clusters taht are inefficient particularly if you have lots of smaller files.


Having one partition is a recipie for disaster IMHO. There is no benefit to having a single enormous partition with todays disk sizes.

In Neils case I would have a primary partition of ~30-40 Gig and a 250ish data partition. (Well, in truth I'd have a 10 gig windows, a 250 gig data and a 15 gig Gentoo Linux :O )

Ian

Re: Hard Drives.
 

Thats what I have at the mo with my currect drive - except the Linux
You would install all the windows programs on the windows partition I take it.
My data, as in my documents are on another PC acting as a server anyway.
Maybe I will try a Linux partition. Would you create the 3 partitions during the windows install from a clean drive? Partition 1 windows, 2 for data and 3 for linux?

Re: Hard Drives.
 

Don't partition and use a seperate smaller drive for your os. Partitioning leads to easily made deleting mistakes! :)

Re: Hard Drives.
 

I would do the following,

Start Windows install, do custom disk partitioning. create a main Windows Partition (primary partition, As you say for windows and all programs) of 30Gig, create the data partition(another primary partition of 210 gig) and leave the rest of the disk as unallocated space at this point.

Complete the windows install as normal. Add whatever you so desire to Windows at this point.

If you are a newbie Linux user I would recommend starting with Mandriva Linux (DVD iso here http://www.mirror.ac.uk/mirror/sunsi...-DVD.i586.iso). When you install this it will ask you if you wish to use unallocated space. You can do this or choose custom partitioning and do it yourself. Linux uses a minimum of 2 partitions, preferably 3 ( / or 'root' a 'swap' partition and a 'home' partition )

Feel free to ask if you want me to pop round to walk you through the first install but to be honest its easier than a windows install, its just that you do all OS, Apps and drivers in one swoop rather than in seperate steps as you do in Windows.(It only takes a single reboot at the end of teh install and its all up and working.)

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Thanks Ian I think I will have a go.
That is a good idea Roy but I want the older drive for anoth machine. I also want to leave 1 IDE port for DVD-ROM and the other for DVD-RW. I am finding it slow ripping from DVD when the DVD-ROM is slaved with the hard drive as master.

Re: Hard Drives.
 

Neil,
make sure DMA is turned on for all drives as this will slow down DVD ripping/playback. DMA allows the data to transfer from DVD to HD/memory without requiring any CPU cycles to do it. Hence massive improvement in performance

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DMA is on mate. I have hard drive and DVD-ROM on the same cable. I think it is slow copying from dvd to disk becasue it is on the same cable. My DVD-RW is on its own cable and is a lot faster. It might just be the DVD-ROM is slow but hey are both only a month old and the same make. I will know when I use the SATA drive

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Is there any benefit in partitioning a 250GB secondry external HD? The original is an 80GB IDE. Does the disc fragment less if it's partitioned?

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If its just a data drive then probably not. It does depend on what filesystem you use. NTFS will be no problem, I can't remember the cluster size of Fat32 when you get to that size of drive, I'll have a dig about when I have a minute spare. I would recommend NTFS over FAT though.

One thing about fragmentation to consider though is that if you set Windows to defrag it a 250gig partition would take AGES, you can do 2x 120 gig partitions in turn rather than in one swoop.

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Ah, I see, it's NTFS. How does it work are the partitions treated as individual drives then, are they given a letter each?

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I'm thinking I should have split it now into two at least, one part for films the other for pictures and gif's