Advice on partitioning

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Guest

I've recently had to replace the hard drive in my laptop because of a hard
drive failure. In setting up the new hard drive, I've decided that I really
need to partition it properly. My laptop was pretty decent for its day. It's
a Toshiba 1.7GHZ P4, but they come with those slow 4200 RPM drives.

As a software developer, and one that develops with SQL Server, hard drive
speed is an issue for me as it greatly affects performance both of builds
and testing DB apps.

One of the big issues I deal with is fragmentation which I believe may have
had a hand in the death of my previous hard drive.

To that end, I've thought about how to remedy the situation and have come up
with the idea of a 4 partition system and would be interested in what people
think about this. The layout would be as follows:

Partition #1 would have the OS and installed applications. These are things
that don't change often and when they do, its usually additions, not much in
the way of deletions, so fragmentation would be minimal.
Partition #2 would be for data files as well as applications I develop. This
includes mail and browser data and temporary files as well as the OS "Temp"
directory. I would expect a good deal of fragmentation on this partition as
builds tend to produce a lot of fragmentation. So does the browser cache and
mail database.
Partition #3 would have SQL database files. These will grow periodically and
there will be a small degree of fragmentation, but periodic defrags should
fix that.
Partition #4 would be for the swap file only. This seems a good way to
ensure a single contiguous swapfile

Does this sound like I good system? It would seem to me that the only
partition requiring regular defragmentation would be partition #2 which
would be relatively small compared to partition #1.

I almost wish I could hide partitions #3 and #4 from regular view since I
would hardly ever need to do anything with them.

Anyway, I'd like to hear comments on this scheme.

Thanks.

Pete
 
Partition #1 would have the OS and installed applications. These are things
that don't change often and when they do, its usually additions, not much in
the way of deletions, so fragmentation would be minimal.
Partition #2 would be for data files as well as applications I develop. This
includes mail and browser data and temporary files as well as the OS "Temp"
directory. I would expect a good deal of fragmentation on this partition as
builds tend to produce a lot of fragmentation. So does the browser cache and
mail database.
Partition #3 would have SQL database files. These will grow periodically and
there will be a small degree of fragmentation, but periodic defrags should
fix that.
Partition #4 would be for the swap file only. This seems a good way to
ensure a single contiguous swapfile

Does this sound like I good system? It would seem to me that the only
partition requiring regular defragmentation would be partition #2 which
would be relatively small compared to partition #1.

I almost wish I could hide partitions #3 and #4 from regular view since I
would hardly ever need to do anything with them.

Anyway, I'd like to hear comments on this scheme.

Thanks.

Pete
Click to expand...
I won't argue with your scheme except to say that the swap file
partition is a bit much to me. Otherwise, separating your database files
from the OS and separating your user data from the OS is a good idea.

I recommend you save the registry keys to move your user data over to
another partition in a .reg file to make it easy to restore these
settings if you have to re-install or repair the OS.

You can remove drive letters from partitions, but that would make it
difficult to access the data on those partitions. Hiding partitions is
something that is designed for multi-boot setups.
 
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