I currently have my 80GB hard drive partitioned into two drives, one around 10GB that stores my OS (win xp pro) and any installed programs such as office and adobe reader etc. The other 70GB partition is used to store music, videos and installed games.
My question is, is there any performance penalty to be found by running games on a seperate partition to the OS? I assume that a game will have plenty of interation with the OS whilst it is running to control sound and graphics, do these interations happen faster when the game and OS are in the same partition?
I’m trying to think about it in terms of the physical disk and have an image in my head of the read/write heads moving frantically between the two areas of the disk representing the two partitions but i’m not sure if that logic is correct.
Nothing I know of would make it slower, particularly if it is really the same physical disk with the same connections and everything. If you actively create and delete files more often on one drive, that one will get more fragmented and thus run slower–but you can fix that by defragmenting regularly. If they are formatted differently (FAT32, NTFS, etc.) then there might be a difference–though I would imagine it to be very minimal.
But generally when a program is started, a folder pointer is created for that app that points to the directory in which the executable is. When the app wants something, the OS will check the folder/file pointer sent in, check which drive it is, from which it grabs pointers to the head of the file system tables–and from that point it’s all just calls for bytes from position XXXX and YYYY, which is all the hardware understands.
The amount of time for the OS to link C: or D: to a physical location on the disk is an issue of having two partitions and won’t favor either. And from that point on, it’s just a matter of how long it will take to wend it’s way through the file system itself. And as said a defragged and also a partition with fewer and fewer nested folders should be slightly faster to navigate–but such time differences should be inconsequential to a human.
When you’re running a game, with nothing else in the background, hopefully most of the stuff you’re referring to as “interaction with the OS” will be stuff that’s already loaded into memory, so there won’t be much need to access your system partition. There is the swap file to consider. I usually put my swap file on a separate partition anyway, at a set size (set min and max size equal in the page file advanced options) so that it doesn’t fragment itself or other files on C:.
The point is I don’t think partitioning your data from your system slows your system much, if at all. It gives you the added protection of having all your data saved should you need to format the system partition, but it won’t save you if the entire hard drive fails dramatically. For that you would need a 2nd hard drive, which would also be the way to get speed increases from file system i/o, or at least guarantee no slow downs.