Partitioning recommendations and MP3 storage

I’m about to rebuild an XP box with a 120 GB drive with screwy partitioning and was wanting to know what the current recommendations are for dicing it up are.

Right now, it’s one vast expanse of 100 GB and a 20 GB dead and unformatted space (think it was intended for ghosting?) but I was contemplating partitioning it into something like:

C: boot drive containing Windows and applications
D: Move “My Documents” here for easy backups
E: Future home for MP3 files

The next question is how big to make the partitions? My ultimate plan is to rip my roughly 500 CDs to MP3 so I can have the PC serve them up to an ethernet jukebox thingy into the main house music system rather than have to search the house and backpack and gym bag and so forth to find the CD that wandered away. How much space can I expect that many CDs to occupy?

How big should the boot partition be?
Or, should I just repartition the thing as one ginormous drive and let “My Docs” be its own folder stucture to back up and have the MP3s live in their own tree?

I split a 120 GB drive into 30 and 90 GB partitions, one for programs and all that other stuff, and the other for media. I’m happy with it.

As for the size requirements, if you assume an average of 600 MB per CD, that’s 300,000 MB or 300 GB. Depending on how you encode the CD, you could be looking at anywhere from 5 to 1 or 10 to 1 compression which gives you anywhere from 30 to 60 GB.

I’m currently running a two hard-drive system, a 40 and 120. The 40’s been partitioned a couple times to run a triple-boot, if I ever get around to it and right now just holds the OS. The 120 is unpartionted and holds everything that is not the OS.

It wouldn’t hurt to partition at least enough for the OS, say 5 to 10 GB, and leave the rest as another partition. That way, at least if you have to reinstall the OS for some reason, you don’t have to worry about backing up the media as long as the physical drive doesn’t fail.

Also, when you do the reformat and partition, it wouldn’t hurt to go ahead and convert to NTFS. You’ll get smaller clusters, which means you won’t waste as much space on small files.

Having two partitions is obviously good for keeping your data files separate from from your system files, but I don’t see the point of the third partition. Using the backup tool included with Windows, it’s just as easy to backup a folder as it is to backup a drive. It wouldn’t hurt anything to have the third partition, but it’s hardly neccessary.

Mainly, that depends on two things - the length of the CDs and the bitrate at which you encode them to MP3. A higher bitrate means better quality, but more disk space. If we assumed very high quality MP3s encoded at 320Kbps and we assumed all 500 CDs to be the 80-minute maximum length, you’d have about 90GB. Obviously all your CDs won’t be that long, so I’d put that number closer to 50-60GB. And, of course, you can cut that number in half, or less, if you decide to sacrifice quality with a lower bitrate.

That really depends on what programs you plan to install. Some games these days take 2GB of disk space. Calculate about how much you’ll need and add a few gigs for the future. I’ve planned poorly and run out of space on my boot drive in the past. These days, I’d call 6GB a realistic minimum. I have a few games and other assorted large programs installed, so I made my boot partition 20GB. There’s still plenty of space free.

You could do that, but I wouldn’t recommend it. If you ever have to format your drive and reinstall Windows, you’d have to backup all your MP3s. With multiple partitions, you can just format the C:, leaving the D: and all the data on it intact throughout the reinstall process.

On Preview: I see asterion beat me to many of my points. I’ll second him on the NTFS recommendation, not just for cluster size, but for the better security and host of other benefits that NTFS provides.

OK. Sounds like my game plan will be to look at what I’ve got application-wise and set a suitably-sized boot partition to hold Windows and applications and then the rest will be data - both “My Docs” and MP3.

The drive’s already NTFS, and I have no plans of changing that.

When the day comes that I’m overflowing the data partition, I’ll just slap in another drive. By then, the cable will probably cost as much as the drive. :slight_smile:

Thanks!