IEMC

Alright, getting a new HDD for Christmas. It's a 250 gig SATA 3 GB/S 7200 RPM Barracuda.

I'm wondering how big / how many partitions should I put.

On my current hard drive, I set 20 GB a side for my OS and other booting software. Then the rest is 90 GB for games and apps.

I've read somewhere that the first partition should be for page file, then a partition for the OS, then another partition for priority software. Supposedly this will be the fastest set up, though not sure how true it is, and I can't find the article.

I want to set a partition up for my Steam apps, which totals about 21 gigs, so I was gonna put 25 aside for it, maybe 30. Not sure if this is the best idea, either.

I need some feedback, because I want the most out of my new hard drive. Thanks

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BlueMak

What I would do (and I have done something similar).

Partition the faster drive into 3 parts. 1 for Windows XP, 1 for a future installation of Vista or other OS. Have at least 30GB for the Vista and 25GB for the XP.
Put programs to the same drive but different partition.
Put games to a seperate drive on a larger than needed partition. You might get more games that what you already have.
If you have lots of music and/or videos, have a different partition for that.
I don't give info on my partitions cause, I don't think you care lol.

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The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

RoyBatty

I think it's best to create one small partition for the system and another partition for data from the remaining disk space. I wouldn't bother with creating a swap partition at the beginning of disk - I doubt that the speed difference would be noticeable.
I have had my 250 GB drive divided into C: and another three partitions but after some time it became a mess, so I joined the three partitions - now I have 4 GB for OS and "priority software" and the rest for data - it's far better

IEMC

Anymore input?

Even after the nay saying of page file partition, I'm still leaning towards it, regardless. It wont be any harm, and it may speed things up, at least a little.

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IEMC

Bump for "expert" advice :P

I wanna know how others lay their's out, too.

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Dyre Straits

I've never been a fan of setting up separate partitions on a single HDD. Rather, I tend to setup the Pagefile on a completely separate HDD as that does make things work faster as it's not requiring communication on the same HDD when it's needed.

Also, by using a good Defrag program (Auslogic is excellent and free!) the defragmentation will sort the data and programs so that the more utilized programs/data/utilities are placed on the faster portion of the HDD.

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temeteus82

Yeah I tend to agree with dyre here. It's better in terms of performance to have pagefile on different hdd that the OS is. But if you don't got the extra drive and you want to keep stuff in separate partitions I would say that 20Gb for OS would do fine. Unless you are using Vista. Then it's better to have at least 40Gb partition.

[EDIT] Since you have XP and you will use NTFS it would be better to just use all that space for one partition. Since now you got one hdd for OS and the other for game and apps. I have currently 2 Seagate's SATA drives one is OS and one is "store" disk.

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IEMC

These posts are confusing the hell out of me.

Just to clear things up, as it seems like either you worded it horribly or you're unclear, I will only be using this drive once I get it. This will be my OS drive and my games drive.

Now, what you just said, temeteus, is that I SHOULDN'T have multiple partitions on that drive? Because that's what I got out of your edit.

Same with you, dyre. What you just told me is to not set up partitions at all, and go with everything on one partition, but that doesn't make sense as most people set up partitions for their OS regardless.

Can someone clear things up? Write it out clearly, please. And don't just address the idea of a page file partition, address everything.

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RoyBatty

If you will use only the new drive than make one small (but big enough) partition for OS and one partition for games/data. That's what I would do.

IEMC

Alright, I read into this some.

As dyre said, a page file on another physical drive helps. I'm still debating on whether I want to use the drive I'm using now as more space for data.

The current drive I have is significantly slower than the new one I'm getting. I tested this one, and it averages 30 MB/s, and the new one is about 3 times that, at 87 MB/s.
If I did add the page file partition on my current drive, while my new drive was for the OS / apps, would the slow-ness make a difference, or would the simple fact it's on a seperate drive make it better?

I also did some research and came on to Microsoft's site. They suggested to have a page file on your boot drive (assuming it has it's own partition) along with a page file on a seperate physical drive (again, it's own partition). I may just do this.

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BlueMak

I fail to see the value of having the page file on a different partition but on the same drive.

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The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

[hobo]eclipse

my take on this stuff is this, first off make it a static size, i use a 2048-2048 MB setup, if the size is determined by Windows it "throttles" the size of the page file to suit your particular needs at that time, thus saving HDD space by not constantly taking up more HDD space than needed, while this makes sense back in the day when HDD space and RAM where limited but nowadays there's plenty of each, This "throttling" of the PF causes it to become fragmented on the HDD, thus after a while reading and writing to the PF becomes more trouble than its worth. I have never placed a pagefile on its own partion, just make it a static size and place it on the fastest non boot HDD. keeping it a static size keeps it from becoming fragmented,

placing a PF on a different HDD solves the bottleneck of the CPU trying to access the HDD for both system files and PF usage atthe same time. placing it on a different HDD lets each be accesses seperatly.

making a PF partition and filing the partion with PF does the same as making it a static size and not allowing it to fragment. now placing this partion on the main HDD will still cause the bottleneck mentioned above at it is still the same drive.

All this beeing said i feel the 2 best options for you to try would be to first try leaving the PF on the boot drive but make it a static size, then maybe try placing it on your older slower drive as a static size if you want to compare performance. I wouldn't worry about making a new partition for the PF.

Install windows and ALL programs on the new drive, stash all non system accessed archives(Music, movies, pics, whatever) on the 2nd HDD with the static PF

these are just my opinions and i cant say im 100 % right on all that but thats how i do it and have no trouble really at all.

IEMC

THERES a response I was looking for.

Thanks a lot, eclipse. I think I'll do it that way.

Thanks for all the input. Still accepting some, if you're wanting to give, though.

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mkk

I can't add much more than advicing further against having a separate partition for the pagefile. If the pagefile resides on the system drive then it's best for the performance of the drive to have that file as close to other often accessed system files, as access time is all important.

Get another gig of RAM and the page usage should be so low that it won't really matter where or how you place the pagefile. On a modern system it is typically used so lightly that technical recommendations on pagefile optimisation while sound, may be of little practical use.

Anyhow the new drive will freshen up the system a bit.

Dyre Straits

I don't know who 'most people' are but I still say what I said before. Just use the full size of the single HDD but put the pagefile on the 2nd HDD. When you run the Defrag program, it will optimize the drive so that those programs and apps you use will be located onto the faster portion of the HDD.

Whereas 'many people' may have separated a large HDD into 3-4 partitions in previous OSes, I think the trend is moving away from that. But, I don't claim any credit for it, either.

Keeping the pagefile on the same HDD as the OS is requiring the communication to work on the same bus necessitating a tandem communication. Moving it onto a different HDD allows the communication to be simultaneous and, therefore, much faster.

But, as mentioned previously, the pagefile, with adequate sytem memory these days, is almost an obsolete entity....but not quite.

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IEMC

I did forget to mention I'm also getting another gig for Xmas, too :P.

Alright, I settled on keeping it as a set size instead of being dynamic, and I'm gonna have one on my boot drive along with one on my secondary drive just so my system can pick which one is gonna be faster (or so microsoft's site says).

On my boot drive, I'll have 20 gigs for the OS, then the rest will be a partition for all of my other apps and games.

On my second drive, which is the one I'm using now, will be for music, movies, pics, etc. This will all be on one giant partition.

Sound good?

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mkk

In case you are looking to do Vista next year then 20GB will be short. In that case try 40GB. It might be irritating to have to repartition at a later time anyhow.

[hobo]eclipse

is there a purpose to formatting a boot drive to 2 partions and putting OS on one and installing apps on that OS to the 2nd partion?

Dyre Straits

I fail to see the logic, too.

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RoyBatty

With my OS (including pagefile and hiberfil) partition being only 4 GB I can make an image and burn it to a DVD. When something goes wrong I can restore it an I have the OS and all my programs like before. I don't need to care about my other data because they are on the other partition. And no more space wasted for the system restore function. It also takes less time to defragment that small partition.

OldBuzzard

If you are only going to have just one PHYSICAL HDD, then yes, make at least 2 partitions on it. One for OS, and the other(s) for apps, and any data you don't want to lose in the event of a system crash.

Page file: The more ram you have the less important it becomes. Like others have said, making a seperate partition for it on the same HDD as your OS won't give you any performance advantage. If you have 2 HDDS, then putting it in a partition on the 2nd HDD it would help.

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When looking for a reason as to why things go wrong, never rule out sheer STUPIDITY

Dyre Straits

I'm only going to emphasize that there is no benefit at all to having TWO pagefiles -- one on each HDD. The very fact that you seem hellbent on putting a pagefile on the same HDD as the OS shows you're not understanding the logic of putting it on a different HDD.

The reason, once again for putting the pagefile on a totally different PHYSICAL HDD is so that the communication can happen simultaneously rather than concurrently. It will definitely be faster if located on the second HDD rather than on the same HDD as the OS. So, there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to put a pagefile on the same HDD as the OS and another one on a second HDD to determine which one is faster. The one on the separate HDD will be the faster one....even if that HDD is a slower HDD.

But, it's your system.


EDIT: BTW, I do want to make this clarification. If we were talking about two IDE/PATA HDDs being setup as Master/Slave on the same IDE cable, this argument would not be true. Since, in this case, BOTH HDDs are attached to the same IDE cable, it would then be best to put the Pagefile on the faster of the two HDDs since communication on an IDE cable can only occur to one HDD at a time. It's important that the various HDDs NOT be connected to the same cable in order for the communication to work simultaneously.

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IEMC

What the hell? You must not read my posts, I said I'm putting a fixed size page file on both drives because, according to Microsoft's site, the OS chooses which will be faster to access from. It won't make a difference, because if what you say is true, than it will always pick the one on the secondary hard drive no matter what.

Who cares if I wanna waste 3 - 5 gigs of space? It wont make a difference.

And no, again, if you read my posts, I said this is an SATA drive. The old one, however, is an IDE drive. So it's not a problem.

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Dyre Straits

Yes, I have read all your posts and understand everything you've posted.

However, many, many OTHER people also read this threads and there's a benefit to stating things that may not be specific to your particular setup.

And, I did say, "it's your system. "

Still, for the sake of others, there's still no benefit at all to having multiple pagefiles scattered across multiple HDDs.

Pagefile Optimization

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IEMC

Ok, gotcha.

And this thread wasn't necessarily about pagefiles, it was about how many, or how they're layed out, partitions would be the best performance enhancer.

Like, if I were to make a Steam (Valve games, basically) partition, would that potentially make the steam games faster (mainly load times, maybe FPS if it leads to that) as it would create less of a chance of fragmenting?

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BlueMak

First of all, why are you so rude?

Second, if you are talking about a seperate partition on the same drive that the OS is on, then I see no reason if just speed is the issue, to do this. I doubt you will see any difference to the better.
As you might know, after you install Steam and download and run games, you can move the folder of STEAM on any drive and they will still work fine, just make sure the shortcuts are redirected.
So if you have a spare drive or partition, you can always try to copy the STEAM folder to one of them and test it for yourself.

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The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

IEMC

I think I understood that. First part made sense, but then the moving of folders threw me off. I understand that "no, it won't make a difference", though.

If I come off as rude, I'm sorry, but what he was saying led me to believe that he wasn't reading what I was saying, only parts of it / skimming.

Anyways, problem solved.

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BlueMak

The thing with STEAM is that where with any other game if you move the folder the game is installed in, you might not be able to run the game, with STEAM the program and the games under it will continue working without any problems, but I think you need to be online, at least the first time after you move the folder, so that it registers or something.

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The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

PangingJr

there are a lot of misunderstanding about what is best for setting up the paging file for your Windows system, this could be due to there quite a bit of misleading information on the internet as i have been seeing since the beginning of Windows 2000 and then XP's. there were not one fit all answers.

because the size and location of paging files can greatly affect your Windows systems performance, and not every system's paging files are required to be optimized.
the only way to make sure you really are optimizing your paging file and you are making it right will be, you need to monitor and test performance at each and everytime that you change the file size, move the file location, add a paging file and/or having several paging files across multiple disk drives, until you find the best setting for your system.

Tipstaff

I have to add that people misread setups that work good in a server environment as also being good for a personal computer, or people that use Linux a lot thinking that the best way for setting up Linux (with a separate swap partition on the same drive) works good for Windows, or setups that work for editing works for everything. These are not always the case.

In the beginning... IDE. 2 separate channels. Best performance was to setup your OS on one drive, page file on another drive on the second channel. This was to overcome two speed pitfalls: data collision, and hard drive access. All data goes through the controller, so in the case of IDE, having 2 drives on the same cable meant data butting heads as the main drive was passing data along the cable to the controller, and onto the next drive while that drive was doing the same thing in reverse. In the case of the latter problem, having multiple partitions with required data spread out between them (one partition with the page file, one with the OS, and one with the installed app, such as a game) means that your hard drive has to work 3 times as hard to page data, possibly along the entire surface of you drive. Take a close look at these 2 issues, and you can see how slow a system could become just trying to get data where it needed to be. Even though SATA has pretty much cleared up the one issue to some degree, if people still hold to setting up partitions like they were going outta style they can create a huge bottleneck for themselves thanks to the increased hard drive access (more specifically, instead of the cable or the controller being the bottleneck, now the drives mechanics become said bottleneck).

So, if you only have one hard drive then the best practice is to leave the page file on the same partition as the OS, and if possible set it to a static size unless you have an app/game that needs to to be dynamic. If you have 2 drives, and they are on separate channels, then the best practice is to put the page file on the second drive (preferably the faster one). However, IF you do any sort of editing, be it picture, movie, or what not, you will still want to put your page file on the main drive, and the scratch file on the second drive, and/or the file you are editing on that drive too. Depending on your setup this might also be beneficial to you if you are gaming as well. Like Panging mentioned though, the best way is to set things up, test different setups, and use what best works for you.

BTW, for those that can't get their head wrapped around having 2 partitions, one with the OS, and the other for apps/storage, think of it this way: re installation. If all you have is one drive, yet you frequently change OS', or like to clean up your system by redoing your OS frequently, then having a small partition that you can wipe while not having to touch the partition your critical data is on becomes handy (especially if you have an image of your main partition on that partition). Got virus? Wipe the partition, and start over ('course, pray to God the rest of your data isn't infected). What if you are still using Windows 2000? Yes, Win2K supports larger hard drives, but only AFTER you activate said support in the registry. During installation you will only see 137GB. So, creating a smaller partition becomes necessary to install that OS on large drives. If you keep thinking along those lines there's a few other scenarios that will pop up where it can be beneficial to have separate partitions as described. In my experience, 80% of computer users are dumb asses; dumb asses that bring nothing with them when they need their computer fixed. So, what I have a habit of doing is creating a second partition, and tell them to store their crap there, as well as for me to keep an image of the installation on (one folder for recovery divided into 2 smaller folders, one for the image, the other for all the drivers), and if size permits, putting an image of the main partition on DVD within the computer case. I can't tell you how much time I save myself by doing this kind of setup.

Mind you, given how cheap drives are these days, and the benefits of using 2 separate drives, it can be counter productive partitioning a drive this way. But then again... cheap as they are, not everyone can afford to buy a second drive (especially given how cheap some of these guys.. err.. dumb asses can be), or has the space/setup for it either. It's really a matter of what you can do, or how much you can afford to do (or how cheap someone is).

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