bratboy

Im building a new computer and its going to have a new 1T HD and I'm trying to decide how to partition it. My plan is to make one partition that will basically hold just vista and several other partitions for different things but trying to decide what size to make them. My origonal plan was
100 gig primary (for Vista)
225 gig (for Data)
225 gig (for Media)
225 gig (for Games)
225 gig (for Vid & DVD editing and Vmem etc)

Does this sound like a good setup? Any suggestions as to a better way are appreciated

BlueMak

225 for games is too much unless you want to have 50+ modern games installed at all times.

100 is too much for Vista, I would give it 80.

When you say Data, what do you mean?

Media?

Vid and dvd editing would best be served with one or two seperate harddrives running in raid. Not as partition of your main drive. It will cause slowdowns.

If I were you I would create the following partitions.

80 for vista
100 for programs
150 for games
the rest for "storage" of files, be it music or videos or general files.

I would then get another or two 500gb or 1tb drives to run in raid for my video editing.
Just make sure you have (if the camera needs it) firewire installed and perhaps one more drive for backups of video edited files.

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bratboy

By media I ment copies of ripped DVD's music etc
By data I meant applications normally stored in the program dicectory ie MS Office, Corel, Document folder etc plus backup copies of all my app install files
As for Games their getting bigger all the time. For example Warhammer is now over 13 gigs and its only just came out. I Like to have them on the HD so I dont have to play swp disks

Adding another HD isnt really an option right now. I do have a second 1T drive but its currently in a USB external casing I could add but figured I would use it to backup my main drive once I migrate everything to the new system.

Tipstaff

Personally I'd leave it to 2 partitions, but to keep things sorted you'd be fine with 3.

Installing programs onto another partition is of no benefit as you'd be swapping data from the same drive from different locations all the time. This can, particularly in games, cause slow downs as the read head runs back and fourth trying to load data. Same goes for video/picture editing swap/scratch files, and pagefile. Unless you have a second drive leave the defaults alone.

Here's how I'd do it: 1 partition for the OS/Programs, 1 for Data (My Documents and personal data), and 1 for music/video files.

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Butch Nackley

Hi

If it were mine and I was going to have a partition for all the games I might install, I would probably go with 500GB. I guess it would depend on what type games you play though. I do a lot of simulations, so with mods and such they really begin to add up rather quickly. My Flight Simulator 2004 is over 30GB, and right now it hasn't got a lot of things I often use in it. It's probably 50 or more normally. rFactor is not very far behind. That's just the two I checked!
I think FSX is like 13 or 14GB right out of the box.

So if you plan to mod games very much and have quite a few of them, the extra space may come in very handy down the road. Many mods are now over 1GB and the trend will probably be for them to only get larger. The world mesh for FS2004 is 11.7GB, ALONE!

Hope this helps
Bye for now.

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PangingJr

what is Vmem?

CDsDontBurn

I would go along the same lines of what Tipstaff said - just 3 partitions. how you would want to split them would be upto you.

i would give 150GB to vista, and 375GB to the other two partitions

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temeteus82

pagefile.sys ?

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ET3D

Some comments:

I'll put the page file on the first partition, since IIRC it's a faster place on the disk. Alternately, a separate partition of its own (so it doesn't get fragmented). Best of all, a partition of its own, first partition of a second disk. But probably leaving it with Windows is the easiest choice.

For installed programs, I do store them as a separate partition, but there's no real practical reason for it. You can keep a subdirectory of C other than "Program Files" for it, if you feel it's more orderly (I tend to install into subdirectories "text", "net", "util", ... and it does help assessing what I have installed).

I won't keep the documents with the installed programs. If there's anything that's worth having its own partition, it's data, IMO. I keep my docs and my mail in a separate parition. This eases backing up and in case another parition gets an error, the data is separate. You normally have to install programs again if there's a problem with Windows, which is why I think it's not all that worth it having a separate partition.

I do have a separate partition for games. One of the main reasons is to force me to uninstall games I don't need, when space runs out. I find that I have many games installed that I don't play, and without a firm limit they'll take over the disk.

I'd also suggest keeping some disk space for backups, so you can store your backup partition. It's not as safe as keeping the backup off disk, but might end up helpful.