Harddisk Partitioning

[Harendra Fernando]

Hi,

Is there a real benefit of Partitioning the Hard drive as C, D and so on in a core 2 duo (ex. W500) machine?

Some people say there is no gain, in terms of speed etc, in partitioning the hard drives in systems/laptops with powerful Processors. Say with a processor such as T9600, 2.8GHz, do I need to partition the hard drive for better performances?

Thanks,
Fdo

[Superego]

Is there a real benefit of Partitioning the Hard drive as C, D and so on in a core 2 duo (ex. W500) machine?

To some extent, yes, but you would need to do some other things to squeeze out some performance. You may want to change your drive format, depending on what you're doing with it. If it's a small partition you may get some gains by formatting to FAT32. Also, moving your paging file from C: to its own, separate partition can boost performance.

With a partitioned drive you would have less disk space to deal with for each partition, so things like indexing and searching would run faster (though this is still dependent on hard drive speed). With processor speeds today your bottleneck is more likely going to be with the hard drive speed (and disk controller). If you were to swap processors (say from a 2GHz T6400 to a 2.5GHz T9400) you probably wouldn't notice any change except in CPU-intensive applications. Now keep the processor speed constant and swap hard drives (5400 rpm to 7200) and you'll notice a difference immediately. Swap to an SSD and you'll see a BIG change.

There are other (IMO, more important) benefits to partitioning. Personal data kept in one partition can be kept separate (a good security practice), one partition could be used for backups, it can help keep you organized, etc.

[Marin85]

What OS do you intend to run on your W500? The partitioning "hacks" to improve performance are rather from the young days of XP and Windows 2000. Now, the HDDs are much faster, not to mention the abundance of system memory nowadays. Partitioning is done nowadays mainly for logical purposes (like storing your documents or music on a separate partition for better overview/control or to make it accessible to another OS, which may additionally require another formatting etc.).

[Harendra Fernando]

What OS do you intend to run on your W500? The partitioning "hacks" to improve performance are rather from the young days of XP and Windows 2000. Now, the HDDs are much faster, not to mention the abundance of system memory nowadays. Partitioning is done nowadays mainly for logical purposes (like storing your documents or music on a separate partition for better overview/control or to make it accessible to another OS, which may additionally require another formatting etc.).

Hi, Thank you for the info.
I am using Windows XP. HDD has 7200rpm. I use my W500 for processer and memory intensive applications. Do you think by partitioning the HDD can improve the performances/efficiency?
Fernando

[Marin85]

If you have sufficient system memory for the tasks you are doing, i.e. the system doesn´t need to make calls to the virtual memory (aka the page file), then I see absolutely no need to bother yourself with partitioning the HD. Otherwise, you may want to have a look here. My personal opinion (based on my experience with my ThinkPad, which is BTW two generations older line than yours) is, even so you won´t notice any performance improvements, hence the hassle to partition the HD and move around data is not justified (IMHO).

A side note: even with plenty of system memory installed, some applications like Photoshop do need and do use the page file (that´s why it is not advisable to disable the page file in windows no matter what).

[schmidtj]

I think you want to minimize disk arm movement.
I was taught the page file should be on it's own spindle or if you only have one spindle then it should be placed in the MOST ACTIVE partition on that spindle.
Additional parititons are just going to cause arm movement that a single partition MIGHT not cause.

[Harendra Fernando]

Many Thanks for the replies!

Fernando

[proaudioguy]

Personal data kept in one partition can be kept separate (a good security practice),

Can you explain that in more detail? How does this help security? I might like to keep certain files more secure.

[barrywohl]

When I installed Vista Ultimate x64 on my T61p 200 gb hard drive, I followed advice from this forum to make a C: partition for programs and a D: partition for data. I think it was a wasted effort. I chose 45 GB for C: and 145 GB for D: . Then, I ran out of free space on C: and I had to rob D: to pay C: with a partition mover. In addition, even though I had "My Documents" folder on D:, I never figured out how to get rid of a small "My Documents" folder on C: wasting more money. I don't really think I benefitted on backups.

Recently, I did a clean install with Windows 7 Professional x64 on a new 500 GB hard drive on the same T61p, and I chose to just make one huge C: partition. My W700 has just one large C: plus the Lenovo service installations.

Just my two cents.

[pianowizard]

For me, the best justification for storing your documents on a separate partition is that this partition isn't affected when you reinstall Windows, so you don't have to spend hours copying the files back onto the HDD after the reinstall.

[proaudioguy]

For me, the best justification for storing your documents on a separate partition is that this partition isn't affected when you reinstall Windows, so you don't have to spend hours copying the files back onto the HDD after the reinstall.

You must be buying a full windows license and disc then because everytime I reinstall with the Thinkpad provided discs it wipes the entire drive out no matter what partitions it has.