How should I partition my 160 GB drive?
I want to store about 150 GB of data on my 160 GB hard drive.
I will use XP to access and to manage this data. The file system
will probably be NTFS.
From a technical and practical point of view, should I have just
one large 160 GB partition or should I break it up into two or
three smaller partitions?
Personally, I don't mind if the data is split up.
The data is 85% jpegs (50 KB to 200 KB) and 15% video (50 MB to 400
MB).
The answer depends not only on the type of data, but how you use it.
For example, one pro for small partitions: it may be easier for you to deal
with smaller chunks, for thinks like backups and restores. It's quicker to
read the backup catalog for a smaller partition than one 4x the size, and
quicker to restore too. Or perhaps some data types stay static while
others change a lot, so you handle those partitions differently.
One con is your unused disk is spread across several partitions. If you
need to save new stuff, the biggest new file size or folder size is then
limited to the partition with the most free space. In a single large
partition, all the free space exists as one consolidated amount.
I don't like dealing with the unused space being spread across multiple
partitions. I end up moving stuff around just to make enough free space to
save something new, or splitting up the new stuff across multiple
partitions. Both waste time. So I prefer one big partition when possible.
Currently, I use one drive for operating systems boot partitions. That's
the only one I have multiple partitions on, one per OS. The rest are all
one partition per drive. One for each for apps, games(also page file),
music, video, and backups(also temp/scratch/working data).
Some are Fat32, (so I can get at them from WinME) some are NTFS (Server
2003). The reason I needed NTFS was for files over 4GB in size, which you
can't have in Fat32. Images for DVDs and video captures in this case.
There are a lot of other NTFS and related OS features you might check out.
Encryption, compression, ACLs, shadow copies, dfs, features for basic and
dynamic disks, etc. I can't say one has been more reliable or faster than
the other for home use. There are some tweaks for NTFS that may improve
the performance, like turning off 8.3 filename creation. You have more
choice in your selection of unit size, etc. Some MS documentation suggests
page files on NTFS work faster than on Fat32. I'm sure you can come up
with a benchmark showing one is faster than the other for something or
other. At the end of the day I don't see a big speed difference working
with both types of partitions, at least not with the apps I use.
I've tried mounting NTFS partitions under WinME using NTFS for Win98 with
mixed results. Sometimes it would hang the system. I eventually gave up,
and limited Fat32 to certain drives. I only need some stuff from ME, the
other 99% of the time I'm in 2003. Ghost 8 boot disks can write images to
NTFS volumes, which is nice. One of the reasons I had to keep Fat32 around
was for saving Ghost disk/partition images. There are other apps that will
give you read/write access to NTFS volumes from DOS boot disks too. So
some issues that might have kept me from using NTFS on a home PC aren't a
big deal today as there are more of ways around them.
I've lost data on both due to a power outage. 2003 Chkdsk on fat32
"recovered lost clusters to files" which I just deleted. 2003 Chkdisk,
default options on the NTFS volume for some reason failed to identify a
corrupt file and I could not delete it. It was quicker for me to backup the
partition and format it and restore it, than play with the various chkdsk
options to try and correct the problem. To be fair, Chkdsk performance
under 2003 has improved on very large volumes with lots of files compared
to nt4 and 2000. I used to dread running chkdsk on some large NTFS volumes.
Best of luck on your drive setup. The only other thing I'd say to consider
is more disks or bigger disks. You may find yourself out of space faster
than you expected.
to be about 20 GB and