What's the point of partitions?

[RejectionMan]

Winblows systems will work faster when the swap file is on a differnet partition only if:

your not pageing heaviliy and using the disk (lots of pageing means you need more RAM, if your also doing something disk intensive it will get worse as the drive has to do more seeks (the average seek time builds up for each movement of the heads between partitions and it gets slower)

Optimal location for swap file is on a seperate disk on a seperate controller. this will compleltely seperate the page operations from regular disk access.

if you really want it to go, use some old reasonalby fast drives in RAID 0 (this will problay only gain you enough efficency to catch up to 1 7200 RPM drive though), but if your doing this much pageing you should realy get more RAM.

[confus-ed]

..lots of pageing means you need more RAM..

Does it hell !!! (but the rest of it I agree with) which is exactly the same mistake the guy on snap-a-log-off.com link (welcome to wd forums btw ) makes

..Whenever the operating system has enough memory, it doesn't usually use virtual memory...

Windows memory management is designed around having a swap file to take advantage of virtual memory addresses which can be most useful in programming terms & its why Billy Boy says this :-

Microsoft strongly recommends that you do not disable or delete the paging file.

If you want it from the horses mouth - How to configure paging files for optimization and recovery in Windows XP

(Note: Billy Boy on this actually says have two swap files so that you can debug should you have a crash - like yeah we all do that - so thats why its generally recommended to just move the system one)

[xycury]

I have a partition with nothing but my video files and workspace i use with Premiere. I also like it on another partition because i set my cluster size to be much larger than the default NTFS format usually does.

I heard this is a small improvement with files are ginormous. Of course i also eat up quite a bit slack space too.

I have seen a little improvement, but i would see more if it was on another controller i think (different HD altogether).

What do you guys think?

hehe and everyone thought this thread would end!

X

[scutterboy]

Just cos you're on the subject here's my fave tip on swapfile location.

http://forums.windrivers.com/showthread.php?t=45896

[WebHead]

I dunno,.. call me ignorant, but after reading this thread, I think many of you are making this more complicated than it needs to be. Most modern hardware is so fast and so high performance that none of this really makes any difference anymore. I can see maybe having 2 partitions (one for apps one for data), but pagefile, etc.,.. it just seems pointless unless you are a hardcore tech guy and just want to do it for the sake of doing it. Back when we were all using Pentiums and 2GB hdd's,.. these types of things would've made more sense because we didn't have the high performance computing power that we have today or the large disk capacity. These days though, all that stuff is (for the most part) irrelevant. I mean, sure if you look at the performance differences on paper, from a technical standpoint, you might see some significant differences. But from the end-user standpoint,.. it makes no real difference.

[3D Prophet III]

I always thought the reason to move your pagefile was to get it off of the system drive to increase performance, not to create a partition and move it there. ie. move pagefile from drive 0 to drive 1. That way when an application that's located on the drive that's with your system files (where O/S is) , on the same partition or not, your HDD isn't cluncking about (disk thrashing) trying to create more virtual memory, opening/running application. other than that you're just creating more work for the system to perform on one HDD.

Oh yeah, the reason you would use multiple partitions would be so you could better manage your files. ex. you have a 160GB HDD w/60GB allocated, you only really use maybe 2 applications (besides the O/S) most of the time. Those two apps that get opened on a regular basis become fragmented, do you want to

A, defrag 160GB of HDD space?

or

B, defrag just those two apps on a 20 GB partition?

[scutterboy]

It still seems worthwhile to me to have a partition for a pagefile. I've seen scandisk tell me that the pagefile is split into hundreds of bits.

It also seems sensible to have a data partition. So I'd usually have three partitions. System, Pagefile and Data.

[TripleRLtd]

I dunno,.. call me ignorant, but after reading this thread, I think many of you are making this more complicated than it needs to be. Most modern hardware is so fast and so high performance that none of this really makes any difference anymore. I can see maybe having 2 partitions (one for apps one for data), but pagefile, etc.,.. it just seems pointless unless you are a hardcore tech guy and just want to do it for the sake of doing it.

I, for one, won't call you ignorant.
You actually have a valid point wrbby. Good habits die hard with old techs. It's almost the same with overclocking nowadays. I mean: what's the freaking point? Back then, it DID matter. But, there is still a better way to do it. Always. Simply put: partitions make sense! And, at least two! One for the OS, and one for data storage, whatever the file storage format.

[TechZ]

Yeah WebHead, its true, I havent moved my pagin file, its more headache that its worth atm. For me, OS, Data, Backup, and Media Storage, thats the partitions I use, simple cause I like them like that, and some partitions contains large files > 1000mb, so defragging them doesnt make much difference.

As far as OC goes Trip, Im gonna do it, AFTER, owning the cpu for 2 years. I know, its not needed so much when u buy the best, but after a while, when the games need teh speed, and u cant go out a buy a new cpu, OC is the cheapest way to go.
Im taking my 2.4 to 2.8 and my vga is gonna get a little OC too. The board I got 2 years ago was voted one of the most stable OC'ers out there, so why not take advantage now, I did pay for it!

scutterboy, i've never seen my paging file more than one large block of data, Diskeeper 9 sees to that.

3dprophet III, If i had an OS and 2 apps frequently used, I'd make one partition say 20gb, for teh OS and apps, if they can make do with that space, and then the rest divide it into 2 like 60+60 or just one large 120, all depends on why u got a 160 for one OS and two apps.

Thats another thing, people tend to be persuaded into large hdd's when they dont need it

[cookin chef]

For me, I still see partitioning necessary.

I don't like sharing my drive C: or a folder on Drive C: with the operating system files on it. I'd rather share my folders on a different partition. If I need to reload an os every once in a year (I call it spring cleaning), I'd rather not have my saved or backed up files on Drive C: as I like to do a clean format.

I sometimes still like to run different os's on my systems. So, different partitions are needed.

I also used to create a separate partition for a paging file, but I don't see that as so necessary anymore.

So, to each their own.

[Matridom]

Hmm, seems this was not mentioned.. I used to create multiple partitions for one reason, and one reason alone.

Slack Space.

Smaller partions have smaller clusters, with smaller clusters, your space is used more efficiently.

with clusters of 16K+ you would be wasting a large percentage of your drive space without realizing it.

making two partitions, cuts that waste in half.

With NTFS v5, the cluster size is small on even the largest partions, so there is no need now days.

[Platypus]

Slack Space.

I think you're right Matridom, it wasn't specifically nominated, although probably implied by a few of us in suggesting small system partitions. Partition size is an easy way to influence cluster size.

Confus-ed pointed out the proliferation of files on Windows installations, so there's good potential for minimising slack space there. Slack space will roughly amount to the number of files times half the cluster size.

As usual it's a balance between conflicting requirements. Small cluster size gives more efficient space usage (less slack space), at the cost of large file tables. Large cluster size could actually gain more space if few extremely large files are being dealt with (eg video capture, DVD images). For example if there are ten 4.7GB files, the difference between having 4K clusters & 32K will be about 150KB in slack space, but the file tables will be megabytes smaller. This also gives potential for better performance and reliability, with much less file table information having to be dealt with for each file. (Remember the heads have to stop handling file data to move to the file table for each update, and the less file table data there is the less time is used dealing with it and the less chance of something going wrong with it.)

This is my thinking behind the large cluster recording partition I mentioned on my own system.

[geoscomp]

From my viewpoint, if you are using ntfs, the only reason for partitioning is to protect files if you have to wipe and reinstall the OS/programs, etc. If you are using FAT32 volumes however, partition size has a very real effect on cluster size and slack space.

Hmm..I'm pretty sure I mentioned cluster size and slack space in the above post

[confus-ed]

I dunno,.. call me ignorant, but after reading this thread, I think many of you are making this more complicated than it needs to be. Most modern hardware is so fast and so high performance that none of this really makes any difference anymore. ... all that stuff is (for the most part) irrelevant. I mean, sure if you look at the performance differences on paper, from a technical standpoint, you might see some significant differences. But from the end-user standpoint,.. it makes no real difference.

Pah pooh poohey webby - this makes a big fat performance hit does all this stuff - methinks on some systems it wouldn't be outlandish to say up to 100% faster - methinks your average user is interested, if a touch lost in all the techno babble

On which note here's some more Default Cluster Size for FAT and NTFS , which shows just how elimintantary Billy's reasoning on this matter is,

..The maximum default cluster size under Windows NT 3.51 and later is 4K due to the fact that NTFS file compression is not possible on drives with a larger allocation size...

when good control of this aspect of file systems is so obviously useful, if a little tricky to achieve him not having cottoned on ..

[SirWise]

If you want your operating system to work efficiently then partitions is the way to go. Having your swap file and/or applications & data on another partition will definately make windows work more efficiently. Keep the C: drive for the O.S. only and you will have a far happier PC.

(and the temp folders pointing to another partition helps also)

I would have to disagree, keeping your swap file on another drive all together is the best bet. Keeping it in another partition is just going to make it have to write info from one half of the drive to the other and cause more head movement. THe only pro I can think of is that it keeps your drive from getting fragmented.