I recently installed a second hard drive. It is 15.3 GB. My old one is 1.2GB. I need to decide how large the partitions should be. I mostly just cruise the net and download stuff and scan my wife’s watercolors(which can create some large files). Any ideas?
Unless a) your older Windows OS requires it, b) your Unix OS requires it, or c) your older hardware requires it, I wouldn’t partition it at all.
Usually I don’t partition unless forced to do so as mentioned by BillH.
Still, there is one reason I’ve found compelling to partition the harddrive for…
You make one partition (on a drive your size) roughly 2GB and install Windows to that partition and usually your applications. Make the second partition the rest of the drive and keep all of your data on that piece. The 2GB is just a size I’ve found to generally be sufficient but feel free to adjust up or down based on your needs.
This allows you to re-build your system without worrying about backing-up all of your data (which can be a serious pain if you don’t have a high capacity removable storage device…CD-ROM Burner, Tape, etc.). In this case you can completely re-format the boot-partition (usually C:) and re-install Windows while your wife’s watercolors stay safe and sound on the other partition.
I tend to abuse my computer (constantly loading and un-loading software, swapping out hardware, etc.) and find I need to re-build Windows once every 6 months or so which makes this trick particularly useful for me.
Agreed. Unless you need the drive partitioned for a specific technical reason like multiboot capability or security issues etc. there is relative little performance gain to be had in using more than a single partition a modern multi-gig drive.
An exception may exist if you have a program that uses tens of thousands of small files like a real estate multiple list system we use with lots of tiny property detail files. By putting the large data file set on a separate partition
you can reduce system bog down on C: drive when using explorer or related file control programs because they do not have to make a scan count of all those files they come up and respond more quickly. Only a small issue but waiting a second or two vs 15-20 seconds for 80,000 files to be scanned and counted makes the system more useful and responsive to me.
I’ve got the latest edition of Win 95, 950B which supports FAT32 and large drives, so that’s not a problem.
On second thought, I really like Jeff_42’s idea. For new hard drives, that is. In the OP case, you’ve already got a boot drive that I assume you’ll continue to use.
I like that idea too. By data, do you also mean preferences, settings, and the like? I’d like to do this next time I re-format but am unsure of the complexities of how to partition it differently. I.e., do you have to tell windows to look for things on the secondary partition?
Chris
Assuming it’s formatted in a way windows can read, it will automatically show up as a separate drive (D: or some such). Telling windows where things are there is done exactly as it would be to tell that something is on the cdrom, or another hard disk, etc. That is, it’s easy.
yeah, waiting for that scandisk after a computer freeze is a major PITA.
‘…do you have to tell windows to look for things on the secondary partition?’
Sort of. If the registry says the program items were on C: and you put them on D:, then it won’t find them. There are special programs, though that’ll change your registry entries for you by searching all the drives for the programs’ location.
One big partition is okay. Its a little easier to keep track of things by keeping the partitions smaller, like 2 to 4 gigs. If you have one giant paritition, youll have a zillion directorys on that one C: drive. & youll have more to skim through.
Another issue with some OSes/filesystems: Many OSes divide each drive up into clusters, and no cluster can be occupied by (portions of) two different files. This means that no matter how small a file is, it takes up a minimum of one cluster. Often, the size of a cluster depends on the size of the drive: I think that they can be as large as 16 k. This means that if you have a program that produces a bunch of little files, like astro mentions, it might be more space-efficient on a smaller partition: On a small partition, each of those files is 4k, on the large one, each is 16 k. I think that FAT32 did away with this, and has uniform cluster sizes for all drives, but I’m not sure.
With Win9x, don’t worry too much about the cluster size issue. Especially if the data consists of a lot of large files. It’s only when you lots(!) of very small files that cluster size really becomes an issue.
With 16GB, you’re probably best keeping it as one large partition – unless you want the new drive to be the boot drive; in that case, follow the previous advice about creating a smaller partition to host the OS and such, keeping the rest for data.
As for program settings and configuration options, most of those are kept in the Windows registry and are almost impossible to reliably separate out. The upshot – if you ever re-install Windows, you have to re-install all your applications and redo all of your configuration settings. So devote a little of that space as a repository for whatever software updates and such that you download.
One trick that I’ve also found useful is to create a single, fairly small partition and force it to use the largest possible cluster size (Partition Magic allows you to do this). Use this partition as the home for your Windows virtual memory file. The actual size you need depends on your system. As a general rule, I recommend allocating about 2.5 times the amount of physical RAM you have.