Thoughts on partitioning

Whats the best way to partition your HD for maximum performance? Does it really produce any performance benefits or is it purely down to choice and the way that u use the data??

I have a 20 GIG HD that is nearly full and I am going to add a 80 GIG drive to the system, but Im unsure whether to partition it or not. My current drive has 2 partitions (8G and 12G) - partitioned through Disk Management on XP. This set up is kinda pointless now though as files are saved whereever I can fit them in now.

 

It really boils down to personal choice.

Of course, 2 practiacl reasons for partitioning are to have backup partitions on different drives in case a drive fails and for backed up documents. There is also an advantage to having a small pagefile partition on the second disk. That gives you the advantage of peer concurrency in that you can access the pagefile and your system files simultaneously.

And, having the pagefile on its own partition on another drive not only adds speed, but also prevents the resizing of the pagefile from fragmenting your system disk.

But having tried nearly all possible configurations, it really boils down to choice and making sure backups are made on different drives.

 

Thanks for replying.

I didn't know about the pagefile and it's something I'll look into. I had a bad experience with PM not long ago, and it put me off partitioning for a while, but now I have full backups, I may play about with it again.