I just installed a new 200 gb seagate hd. The sole purpose of this drive is for storage. I went ahead and alocated 100% of the drive to one big partition. Are there any large benefits to breaking it up into smaller partitions?

11/5/2006 10:36:28 PM

if a partition dies, the others don't.

one partition dies, one partition dies.

11/5/2006 10:38:56 PM

i always make a partition for the os and a partition for everything else

11/5/2006 10:39:52 PM

well me too, but not if

Quote :

"The sole purpose of this drive is for storage."

11/5/2006 10:49:03 PM

my computer is set up as follows:

DISK0
- C: (windows) is 20-30gb
- D: (page) is 2gb
- linux partition is about 15gb
DISK1
- E: (mydocs) is usually 200gb and contains my entire "My Documents"...filed up mostly with 20mb RAW files

i have 3 external drives that i use just for storage (one 500gb is just for backup)

if you're using it just for storage...i suggest a single partition...also, unless you access it on a regular basis, i suggest setting it up as an external drive - no reason to have it on all the time if you don't use it...just wastes drive life IMO

11/5/2006 10:49:22 PM

I currently have an 80gb external drive used for storage. I'm going to copy everything from that over to the 200gb drive and then use 80gb drive as a backup. Can anyone suggest any good software to back up my specific folders on a weekly basis?

Also, would it be better to back up everything to a rar file or some other compressed format instead of just copying over all the files?

[Edited on November 5, 2006 at 11:19 PM. Reason : ]

11/5/2006 11:08:42 PM

Quote :

"if a partition dies, the others don't. one partition dies, one partition dies."

I'm not so sure about this. I think it's very unlikely you'll have a "partitiion die". In most cases, the hard-drive will simply go bad or die, killing all partitions on the whole drive. I can't think of a reason a single partition would die without affecting the whole drive.

11/5/2006 11:50:37 PM

OS corruption, for one

11/5/2006 11:52:55 PM

oh, yeah, i guess so. or virus i suppose. but, meh.... in all my years with dozens of computers, i've never had either, so if you're careful, you shouldn't have to worry about that. actual hard drive failure is probably a bigger threat.

11/6/2006 12:04:40 AM

another hard drive question. I was reading the wiki page about skype and came across this nugget

Quote :

"a hard disk will actually last longer if left spun up compared to being constantly spun up and down. Spinning down a hard disk is strictly a power-saving feature"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype

can anyone verify that? I can see arguments for both sides. How much would the power usage increase in a home computer if you set the disks to never spin down?

seems like for one or two home computers it would be better to never spin down the disks due to the relative cheapness of power

11/6/2006 12:52:15 AM

That's what I've always heard, but that was vs. turning your computer on and off every day or multiple times a day. I'm not sure if it's still true if I'm just using the drive once a week for a backup.

11/6/2006 7:36:51 AM

yeah, what's the deal with that now a-days? just don't do it multiple times a day or?

11/6/2006 9:37:13 AM

ncsu's office of energy management addresses that question:

http://www.ncsu.edu/energy/main.php?s=2&c=2-7

Quote :

"I have heard that I should not shut off my computer at night because it does damage to the computer if it is frequently turned on and off. Is this true? How much would I save if I did turn it off? This is no longer the case. The belief that frequent shutdowns are harmful persists from the days when hard disks did not automatically park their heads when shut off; frequent on-off cycling could damage such hard disks. Conventional wisdom, however, has not kept pace with the rapid technological change in the computer industry. Modern hard disks are not significantly affected by frequent shut-downs. Shutting down computers at night and on weekends saves significant energy without affecting the performance, and may increase (rather than decrease) the operating lifetime of the equipment."

http://eande.lbl.gov/EA/Reports/39466/39466-4

11/6/2006 1:23:48 PM

random access over a small partition will be much faster than random access over the full stroke of a drive

with that in mind, generally speaking you should create the smallest OS partition you can (I find it minimally bothersome to use a 4GB partition size for a WinXP OS partition, more or less to taste but in that ballpark), and possibly one or more application partitions, in addition to the assumed large data partition

of the application partitions, anything that is particularly I/O bound such as video editing, audio/video encoding, etc is a candidate for receiving its own partition

finally, you should probably create an temp/incoming partition so that multiple simultaneous incoming file transfers aren't written in a fragmented manner to your data/app/system partitions

[Edited on November 6, 2006 at 5:46 PM. Reason : *]

11/6/2006 5:44:59 PM

^ okay, so what's your suggested partition setup for the following specs:

two sata hard drives - one 40gb and one 250gb
1gb ram

user does some gaming (oblivion high on graphics and bf2 high on processor/ram)...does some video editing (mostly creating dvds from video camera footage, and then some virtualdub stuff)...does some graphics stuff with photoshop

to make allowances for most of the people on here: assume some usage of bittorrent, itunes, dvddecrypter/dvdshrink so i suppose they could be using some large files

[Edited on November 6, 2006 at 5:51 PM. Reason : .]

11/6/2006 5:50:29 PM

I'd use the 40GB as incoming/temp data, 4-8GB on the 250 for OS installation, 20-30GB for applications, and the remainder for sorted data and documents

I believe you can redefine the locations of "Documents and Settings", "Program Files", and even "Windows" to make it less tedious to set the installation path to your application partition for every setup and for every save browse to your data partition. I vaguely recall doing something like that, but it's been a long time since I used WinXP for any computer I spent that much time on

[Edited on November 6, 2006 at 6:03 PM. Reason : you may also want to use part of the 40GB to back up the "documents" part of your large partition]

11/6/2006 6:02:48 PM

just go to properties for "my documents" and move it

11/6/2006 6:06:28 PM

not referring to "my documents" but the system folders named above, I believe something extra is required to relocate them

^^btw when I say temp data I mean output from video editing as well, streaming from one disk to another is generally faster than streaming back to the same disk

[Edited on November 6, 2006 at 6:11 PM. Reason : *]

11/6/2006 6:08:36 PM