How many partitions should I create on my hard drive?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I have a new computer with a 160 Gb hard drive. It has not been partitioned. Mostly what I will be doing is e-mail, internet surfing and a small amount of photo and video editing.

What factors should I consider when deciding how many partitions to create and which size they should be?

Thanks in advance for all your sage advice.

2

I’m a big fan of the SYSTEM and DATA partitions model. Ideally they’d be on separate spindles, but two partitions on one physical drive is the next best thing.

I try really hard to keep all of my data on the second partition which makes it really easy to rebuild the machine for whatever reason. Just blow away the first partition and rebuild with your data nice and safe on the other one.

3

What Servo said. Put all the programs on one partition, along with Windows. Use a separate (far larger) one for data - you can change the ‘my documents’ to D:\ or whatever. As a rough guide, I’ve got my Windows installation and all program files (including Office Pro, Photoshop, etc) on a 10GB partition, which is two-thirds full.

4

If you want to be a real geek, in addition to the system/data model, you can create a third partition for your Windows (assuming you’re running Windows) swap file. I forget what the recommended size is, something like twice your system RAM, I believe.

The rationale is that since the file is on its own partition that it’s less likely to get fragmented/corrupted and, I believe, adds a little bit of to the performance your system for an esoteric reason I can’t recall at the moment (possibly just the “less fragmentation” reason).

5

Using a separate partition for the swap file is a myth. Any marginal performance gain from non-fragmentation is lost by the drive having to constantly jump from one partition to another. If you’re really concerned about fragmentation, just set the minimum and maximum swap sizes to the same value. (Having the swap on a second drive, however, can have a noticeable effect.)

6

You might want to leave a chunk of it - say 10 GB, unpartitioned, incase you ever want to install Linux on your machine.