Partition size

[BillW50]

In Terry R. typed on Sat, 22 Aug 2009 14:02:18 -0700:

The date and time was Saturday, August 22, 2009 12:19:49 PM , and on a
whim, BillW50 pounded out on the keyboard:


You didn't plan the 10MB, that was all there was most likely. I first
purchased a Tallgrass 20/20 that was a 20MB hard drive and a 20MG tape
backup, which was the largest available at the time. When the
computer was retired, the drive wasn't full and it was in operation
until 1992.

My hard drives now have empty space next to any partition that may
need to expand. If I need to do that, I can enlarge it and be fine
for another year or two. Since I have multiple backup partitions
throughout the 3 hard drives, I planned this very well. If I needed
another 20 gig for something, I could have it right now. Planning
works well and partitioning IS a good plan. Just because it didn't
work for you doesn't mean it doesn't work at all.

Just because it works for you doesn't mean it will work for others.
Let's say I got you interested in X-Plane that needs 60GB. Now what will
you do?

Scramble a hard drive with contiguous clusters and one heavily
fragmented and see which one is easier to retrieve files on. Sure it's
no biggie if there is a current backup, but all to many clients I have
(and friends and relatives) DON'T have backups or don't do them
regularly, regardless if they've been told.

Yeah well we can't help people who don't listen. Many don't plan for a
disaster and don't care until it happens.

I don't see it that way. And I will continue to defrag. You feel
differently.

You can, but I don't know why? Back in the 80's drives were formatted as
MFM and were very slow. Defragging them made a *huge* difference! And
here is where all of this *must* defrag stuff got started IMHO. As when
IDE drives came out in the 90's, it made little difference. And today
manufactures has worked a couple of decades of eliminating the poor seek
time. And I feel they have done a fine job and defragging is virtually
not necessary for almost anybody.

Regardless, defragging is far from "one of the worst conditions you
can do to a drive".

I disagree. It is the most useless hard activity you can do to a drive.
Some people swear they see improvements. Well if they see it, I say
fine. But if you don't and I haven't for the passed 20 years, I don't
see the point.

Having that luxury is nice. But I can't keep multiple workstations
like this one around. Your netbooks are fine if that's all you need.
It's much easier to have my 3 hard drives and be able to get back to
work in 30 minutes if a drive dies.

I have 5 netbooks and two laptops I use regularly. I gave up on desktops
about 5 years ago. And I usually only use one at a time. So if one goes
down, needs to reboot to update or something, it just isn't a problem. I
just grab another one. Life seems so simple to me.

 

[Terry R.]

The date and time was Saturday, August 22, 2009 2:17:18 PM , and on a
whim, BillW50 pounded out on the keyboard:

In Terry R. typed on Sat, 22 Aug 2009 13:48:40 -0700:

The date and time was Saturday, August 22, 2009 11:52:37 AM , and on a
whim, BillW50 pounded out on the keyboard:

In Terry R. typed on Sat, 22 Aug 2009 11:31:49 -0700:
[...]
And I installed all of my programs for each OS onto another drive
(E. That way I only have one installation of each program for
every OS, and even my Programs drive is small. Windows doesn't care
where you install the programs and they run fine on any installed
drive.
I used to do things that way at first too. But they end up being
corrupt and confused. As they also store settings in the registry
and with updates, new definitions, etc. one OS doesn't know of the
changes that the other has made and it goes downhill very fast.

I've been doing it for over 7 years and not one issue. The other OS's
don't need to know of changes. If there's an update to a program, I
install it to the OS's when I go into them. If there would be any
issues at all, it would be using Firefox and Thunderbird, as they are
updated frequently. But I don't, except that they don't run on the
older OS's any longer, but I'm getting ready to retire them anyway due
to clients finally moving away from them.

Well I quit this practice about 7 years ago so maybe things has changed
since then. Also I admit some applications are fine with this practice.
But not all of them.

Since neither of us has tried "all of them", I guess neither of us are
able to say exactly. But I doubt there would be any that wouldn't run.

Even keeping the same drive letter, it still doesn't work. As about half
of the applications I install refuses to install on a removable drive at
all. They insist that it has to be a fixed drive. There are tricks to
make it work, but generally the tricks doesn't work if you want to
sometimes remove the drive. Which defeats the purpose of having a
removable drive in the first place.

Ah, that's right. Has to be a fixed drive. Portable Apps has a decent
list of apps for flash drives.

Terry R.

 

[Terry R.]

The date and time was Saturday, August 22, 2009 2:56:23 PM , and on a
whim, BillW50 pounded out on the keyboard:

In Terry R. typed on Sat, 22 Aug 2009 14:02:18 -0700:



Just because it works for you doesn't mean it will work for others.
Let's say I got you interested in X-Plane that needs 60GB. Now what will
you do?

I have plenty of empty space on these drives. If I wanted to, I could
slide a partition over if needed, but I could do 60GB easily.

Yeah well we can't help people who don't listen. Many don't plan for a
disaster and don't care until it happens.

Yes, but a defragged drive would have a better success rate at
retrieving data than a highly fragmented disk.

You can, but I don't know why? Back in the 80's drives were formatted as
MFM and were very slow. Defragging them made a *huge* difference! And
here is where all of this *must* defrag stuff got started IMHO. As when
IDE drives came out in the 90's, it made little difference. And today
manufactures has worked a couple of decades of eliminating the poor seek
time. And I feel they have done a fine job and defragging is virtually
not necessary for almost anybody.


I disagree. It is the most useless hard activity you can do to a drive.
Some people swear they see improvements. Well if they see it, I say
fine. But if you don't and I haven't for the passed 20 years, I don't
see the point.

You already agreed that video editing stresses a disk far more than
defragging. Just because you think defragging useless doesn't make it
stress a disk more. It doesn't. I don't know anything that stresses a
disk more than video editing. And I never said I didn't see benefit
from it. I do.

I have 5 netbooks and two laptops I use regularly. I gave up on desktops
about 5 years ago. And I usually only use one at a time. So if one goes
down, needs to reboot to update or something, it just isn't a problem. I
just grab another one. Life seems so simple to me.

Keeping them all updated the same doesn't seem simple. It's much
simpler to have one good machine and have confidence in your backup plan.

And what video editing do you do on any of them? I don't know any
laptops able to do a lot of video editing/rendering other than the
priciest of them, which I doubt yours are. And I'm sure lap-tots aren't
up to it.

Terry R.

 

[Ron Badour]

Comments in line

Plus many negative ones. Like I have 5GB free on C, 15GB free on D, and
15GB free on W. And I need 20GB free to edit a video file. Oops! I can't
do it even though I have 35GB free on the drive. <sigh>

Sounds like a larger hard drive with bigger partitions may be required. Or,
perhaps a partitioning program to adjust partition sizes. Or, perhaps just
one partition if you are so inclined. Proper planning doesn't always work.
I just had to borrow 5 GB from my D: partition because things were getting
tight on C: But, it took four years for things to get tight.

With real-time monitoring, you don't need to do virus or malware scans.
Plus it is just as easy to select folders to scan vs. partitions. So this
excuse just doesn't cut it.

Surely you jest. I get a lot of computers to work on that won't run
properly or sometimes won't even boot--malware and viruses are responsible
99% of the time. Just because you know what you are doing doesn't mean that
others do.

There is no data that exists that supports this claim at all! A hard drive
doesn't care where it is writing or reading. At worst, all it changes is
seek time and nothing else. And that isn't very important anyway since
hard drives comes with buffers for years.

Not what I said. If there are 50 gb of pictures that are defragged each
time defrag is run, defrag is working overtime needlessly. And, defrag
stresses the system and not having it defrag the pictures saves wear and
tear.

I also *only* defrag my hard drives once every 2 years. I record the boot
time before the defrag and after the defrag. The time difference is
minimal and wasn't even worth all of the time it had taken to defrag in
the first place.

Boot time is not the only affected by a fragmented drive. How about
programs seeking files all over the drive?

And if you are a believer in lots of reading and writing all over the
place is lots of wear and tear on your hard drive. Then defragging all of
the time is one of the worst things you can do. As the head is flying all
over the place, the drive heats up higher than it normally does, and it is
reading and writing virtually everything on the drive all over again. This
is one of the worst conditions you can do to a drive!

Agree to a point. I have defragged my four year old hard drive about four
times. All I defrag is C: drive so I save wear and tear. But, what you and
I do means little when there are folks who run defrag weekly. If that is
what they want to do, then partitions make sense for them. I can only
advise clients on what to do--I cannot force them to change.

If you don't back up, you lose everything if the drive fails to spin. So
it is your fault, whether you use partitions or not.

Granted. But my experience is that drives fail a lot less often than a
system does. If the data did not get backed up and the o/s fails, I can
easily retrieve data from another partition. And if the disk is not too
badly fragmented, I can normally recover data with my retrieval software
regardless of where it is located.

You haven't made one reasonable point for supporting multiple partitions
yet. So why should anybody bother?

My points are just as reasonable as yours. Like I said, it boils down to
personal preference. And for what it is worth, when I set up a client's
machine I generally use one partition because I try to get a sense of their
abilities and most need a single partition. And, when I ran out of space on
my hard drive a couple of months ago when I was doing video editing, I
installed an extra 80GB hard drive and I only created one partition on it.

--
Regards

Ron Badour
MS MVP
Windows Desktop Experience