Thread: What is a Hard Drive Partition?

I'll be using a single WD Caviar Black 640GB hard drive and either Windows Vista 64 or Windows 7. Does partitioning using a single drive offer any advantages for gaming? If I partition should games be placed in same partition as the OS or on the next partition? How much should I allow for Vista 64 or Windows 7 alone? What about the page file?

Finally, if I only intend to partition whenever installing or reinstalling Windows, is a partitioning program necessary?

No, there won't be any difference at all as long as the game is stored in the system drive. Games installed in the OS partition will definitely load faster but there shouldn't be a huge difference in the load time for such a fine drive like WD Caviar Black. Perhaps, a merely 1 or 2 seconds faster.

Most people install games on the next partition(D drive) nowadays due to latest games occupying so much spaces, messing up the OS partition with fragmented files generated during the process of gaming and .... "LONG STORY!" Well, it depends on how many programs you are going to install on the OS partition.

The only information I can give you is that the Windows 7 Ultimate occupies approximately 16GB alone(much lager for Vista Ultimate, but it can be shrunk by disabling the hibernation ...I forgot how big it is as Windows 7 is the one being installed on my PC now. ) I let my OS decide it. However, the size of the page file shouldn't be an issue at all with WD Black, 4GB dual channel Ram and E5200(or better) CPU. No, you can partition you HDD during the installation of the OS. "Acronis True Image" is handy for backing up your partitions though.

For performance purposes, there's no advantage to partitioning a hard drive. If you create two equal-sized partitions on the drive, then you're forcing the drive to move its access arm across half the disk every time you access data in one partition vs. the other. That's going to hurt performance, not help it.

You're better off having just one partition and keeping the disk defragged so that all of the files are as close as possible to the outer edge of the disk where the performance is best. That will minimize arm movement and maximize performance.

There may be other reasons why you'd want to partition the drive, but performance is NOT one of them. If you DO partition a disk, you'd want to keep all of the frequently-accessed files in the same partition so as to minimize seek time.

Thanks.

There's a lot of information about partitioning to digest. I know files on the outer edge are read faster, but I wasn't exactly sure of all the methods to achieve that.

The last few times that I reinstalled Windows XP I created partitions not knowing for sure if I was gaining any performance advantage. A lot of conflicting info. I created C: for the OS, D: for Games, and E: for programs/apps. It was OK for organizational purposes, but some programs would not allow me to load to D: or E:. I also wasn't sure if having some of the files from a program located in C: despite being loaded in either D: or E: would adversely affect performance.

So I guess there is no real advantage for me to partition other than keeping things separated and organized?