Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

Partitioning or Not w. single HDD?

<< < (5/6) > >>

Shades:
There is another advantage with having everything divided into partitions. Especially with the use of portable apps.

Whenever I need/want to use a virtual machine, I just need to install one and make sure the partition with my programs is directly available to it. With VirtualBox you have such options, I assume VMware will be able to do the same.

This saves me a lot of storage space, om both the host and in the virtual machine. I can make use of the same software at the same time in both the VM and the host. No re-install and/or reconfiguration required. As that usually is the part that consumes the most time from an re-installation, I am glad to get rid of that.

Partitioning is a good thing in my book, especially when the tasks the computer needs to do don't change that much over the time you plan to use that computer. So that leaves the sizing of the partitions. Getting that right is important and easy to do wrong. The resizing of partitions, which is a hassle on itself, is also not without risk.

The partition sizes I mentioned earlier work perfectly for me, but there is no guarantee that these will work for you. Especially if you want to play games, you should increase the size of the software partition significantly. Modern computer games consume storage space like there is no tomorrow.

I haven't had a need to change the partition size of any partition on my own system in 6 years (besides partitioning the SSD I got recently).      

xtabber:
Modern hard drives, particularly large ones, have pretty sophisticated caching and data management built into their firmware, so partitioning won’t usually have a huge impact on performance. But a good partition scheme can make a difference in safety and recoverability from disaster.

I used to do a lot of work on tight deadlines, so I always operated with the idea that if my system went down, I could pick up and finish what I was working on before anything else.

On desktop systems, I partition the HDD into 3 logical drives as follows:

C: is for critical files, including the OS, installed software and important files, including current work files, email and financial data, which I also keep duplicated on my laptop. This is about 100-120GB under Windows 7. Windows Recovery is turned off, but the drive is imaged at least once a month.

D: is for most other data, including multimedia, reference materials and VMs.

E: is for extended data storage, which includes software installation files, CD/DVD images and backup images of the system drive.  This is omitted on laptops.

Actually, I now use an SSD for C, so the HDD is just partitioned into D and E. When C was on the hard disk, I defragmented it often, but that is no longer necessary. I don’t image or defragment D or E, but I do keep their contents duplicated on external drives.

Stoic Joker:
But a good partition scheme can make a difference in safety and recoverability from disaster.
-xtabber (July 08, 2015, 10:07 AM)
--- End quote ---

I fail to see how. In all the years I've been doing this stuff, I've seen machines eaten up with all sorts of failures and maladies. But I've never once ran into a situation where extra partitions would have made a difference. Either the drive is still spinning, or there are valid backups available ... Or the drive stopped dead, the backups don't exist, and the party in question is quite royally screwed.

Shades:
@Stoic Joker:
We will agree to disagree on this bit of computing  :P

A partition scheme doesn't help with a drive stopping dead in its tracks. On that one we are in agreement. Only once I have encountered such a type of HD crash, but I must say that I hardly work with laptops and I assume those devices would encounter such crashes, because of how these are (mis-)treated.

Spinning hard disk tend to die slowly in desktops and servers, at least in my experience. And in those cases I found partitions to be very helpful with recovering/salvaging information. After all if everything was stored in one partition, chances of overwriting data to be restored with data that is currently being restored is too high.

Lets say I think of the NT file-system as a child. With clear borders it behaves well. Without those borders? Expect it will throw tantrums at your most inconvenient moment.

Giampy:
the intention behind the 3 partitions was to make reinstalling the OS easier in the event of a disaster of some kind.

However, I currently strongly suspect that I may be trying to solve the wrong problem...because I haven't had to reinstall the OS since 2007 when I first built the machine.-Stoic Joker (July 08, 2015, 07:18 AM)
--- End quote ---

Great consideration.  :Thmbsup:

Experience makes us wiser.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page