Ok, I am getting closer to actually installing my new 160 GB hard drive. I need to clean up all my old files, then do some backups and I’ll start to copy over the contents of my existing drive to the new one.
I have been giving partitions a lot of thought and wanted the input of the technologically-inclined that hang around here. So, here’s how I plan to set up my drives. Any advice, critiques, suggestions and praise is (as always) welcome. C:2 GB (FAT 32) - DOS partition. (I use some DOS utilities at work and may need to leave a DOS-ready option for future use).
F:50 GB (NTFS) - Digital audio (-note there is enough space for when I upgrade to the bigger iPod ).
G:30 GB (NTFS) - Digital photos.
H:20 GB (NTFS) - Backup (A complete image of the D: drive, plus any programs & files not yet burned to disk).
And I will dedicate my 40 GB (NTFS) second drive solely to video capture & editing (I plan to up this later to a larger disk, but still keeping it only for video).
well, uh… whatever floats your boat. It’s been my experience that a huge ass single partition is just right for me. If I want to keep data sorted, I just sort it in the root of c:.
I can see the need for a FAT32 partition, and even a 20-40 gig partition for your OS/Programs just to make it easy to Ghost, but the rest seems like overkill to me.
FWIW, I would do a 40 gig system/program partition, and use your spare 40 gig hard drive as the backup area for ghosting. Having your backup partition on the same drive as your system partition makes no sense from a disaster recovery standpoint (if the one hard drive physically fails, you lose your backup as well).
Ah! Good point, Anonymous Coward! I was only thinking in terms of video capture & editing; I’d want to give that it’s own physical drive to make it go smoother.
I was planning on burning a copy of my ghost image every once in a while for a physical copy, but leaving it on the drive as well in case I need to roll back to a stable state (after some crappy software kills me!) Sadly, I hadn’t even thought of the drive getting physically damaged! :wally
I read somewhere that it’s a good a idea to set aside a small partition for temp files, internet cache and others files that fragment easily and often to reduce the need for defragging your main OS partition. Every time you clear out your temps and cache, you’re essentially slicking that partition. No need that cache partition (at all). And you’ll reduce the time it takes to defrag the OS partition.
I never put backup data on the same disk as the primary data. If there’s a physical problem with the disk (it gets wet, dropped, shorted, scratched, the motor dies, etc.), you lose both your primary and your backup. Buy a second hard drive and designate it as a slave. Install an operating system on it so that you can boot off it in the event your primary drive/OS fails, and then use it solely for backups. Or better yet, just RAID-1 them.
Oh no, I’m definitely going to make the slave drive my backup location (now). I’m actually kind of embarrased I didn’t think of it before Anonymous Coward pointed it out.
For the record, I’m also re-thinking so many partitions now as well. I was planning on splitting into partitions so I could manage the disks better, and run maintenance apps on several smaller drives rather than one monster drive. But, I’m now worried about setting limitations that would be too difficult to change later, so I combined some instead.
Here’s what I’m thinking now:
First disk:
C: (FAT32) - Dos (2GB)
D: (NTFS) - Primary OS & Program files (18 GB)
E: Audio/Video/Photos (140 GB)
F: (CD Burner)
Second Disk*:
G: Documents / Downloads / Unzipped / Drivers / etc (20GB)
H: Backup location (20 GB)
*with intent to upgrade this disk in the next 6 months to at least an 80GB HDD.
Good call on putting your backup files on the second disk. Are you also backing up your G: data to the same place though? In that case, maybe you can spare some space for a backup partition on your primary disk. Or, alternatively, back up those files to CD.
Still no partition for temps? You don’t need much space and it will definitely keep your C: drive much less fragmented and running optimally.
The C: partition should be self-obvious. D: is where I keep things like downloaded driver updates and copy the installation CDs for MS Office. E: is the entire My Documents folder structure. This includes a raft of pictures in “My Pictures” and “My Music” holds the iTunes folder structure which feeds to both an iPod and a server app that streams music to a wireless MP3 player in the living room.
In case my drive dies, all I really and truly care about is E: - and to back it up, I just drag the “My Docs” folder to an external drive now and then. The install files are all very easily replaced, and since there’s no actual data on the C: partition, if it goes away, I just need to re-install Windows and the applications.
Speaking of going away, in case it does, no biggie as I’ve got my external drive partitioned similarly to the internal. C: is ghosted to the external drive’s primary bootable partition, and D: and E: are just copied over. If my internal drive dies, I should be able to just yank the drive out of the external case and use it to replace the internal drive and be back in business.
And why are you keeping a dinky 40 GB drive for video work? New drives have fallen below the level of “absurdly cheap” to “pretty soon, they’ll be prizes in Cracker Jack” - I just picked up a name-brand 200 GB, 7200 RPM, 8 MB cache drive for $70.
What ‘temps’ do you have in yours? Cookies & internet cache I assume. Anything else? I’m nopt sure how to tell Firefox to keep them somewhere other than the default too. -I suppose I could figure it out.
I haven’t done it yet, but my plan is to have a dedicated partition for temps/cache. Internet cache and cookies I would say are the most significant contributors to fragmentation. Particularly because, as I understand it, small files (1kb files, like cookies) don’t use all the space within the cluster they inhabit, but you can’t have more than one file per cluster. So, a 4kb cluster holding a 1kb file leaves 3kb unuseable. Multiply that and you have wasted space. Delete those files and you have holes that lead to fragmentation.
Isolating them seems to me a good start. You also have temp files created when installing certain applications, sometimes you can specify where to put those files. Also, if I’m unzipping an app for installation, I would put the unzipped exe and accompanying files (if any) in the temp partition to be deleted after install, retaining the zipped file in an archive for later use. Not much effect on fragmentation unless I forget to delete it, but keeping in a designated temp partition means I don’t have to remember.
On how to tell Firefox where to put the cache, see here.
Yeah, but you lose space due to having a bigger block size on the bigger partitions. Of course, disk space is cheap compared to the effort and time required to maximize this kind of thing.
I just use one big partition on each disk and keep things separate with directories.
While I agree with not putting backup data on the same disk as the primary data, I disagree with using RAID-1 because RAID is not useful for backups. One accidental delete and the data is gone on both the primary and backup disks. Also RAID will not help when a software installation goes wrong. In these cases a copy of the original data is what you would want.
My opinion: one the smaller 40GB drive I would put two partitions. 1 gig, maybe only 500 megs for DOS (do you really have two gigs of DOS programs you use?) and the rest for the main OS. On the second drive, install everything else–including installed applications. Partition the second drive as you wish, if it makes things easier for you to find.
My reasoning is that 1) Windows runs fastest with LOTS of unused space on its partition, 2) programs run fastest if they installed on a separate drive from the OS.
…
The thing about software partitions is that they are only really helpful in speeding up defrag time and managing file priveledges (the latter not important here). So any files that you will change a lot should be on their own (relatively small) partition, so that it will defrag fast and you won’t need to defrag the other larger more-stable partitions nearly as often, just to sort out your most-frequently-used files. …Ideally, you would have four separate physical drives: one each for OS, OS swap file+Photoshop scratch disk, installed applications and the fourth for everything else.
Also, I would skip the ghost drive myself, I have not bothered for a long time now. A good antivirus program does wonders for avoiding the need to reformat. If you saved all your Windows, application and driver updates to disk anyway, they take up less space than ghosting an entire drive, and allow you to reinstall your whole system again pretty painlessly.
~
).