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Best practices for partitioning a hard disk

By: lowster11
 

I'll describe the partitions I created for my computer and explain the
benefits you can gain from dividing your hard disk into more than the single
partition and hard drive that it originally came with. These benefits can
help you be better organized, more productive, and ensure the integrity of
your data.
Overview of my partitioning scheme

Partitioning helps me manage my work, especially on the computer that I use
most for my writing. The figure below shows the two physical disks
partitioned as follows:

Disk 0 has a System partition (drive C) and a Data partition (drive D).

Disk 1 has an Archive partition (drive E), a Research partition (drive F),
an Other partition (drive G), and a Paging partition (drive H).

Here's how you might set up a partitioning scheme similar to mine. You can
adapt these steps to meet your own needs:

1.Install Windows on drive C on your first hard disk.

2.Create a second partition on your first disk to store your active work
files, and keep it fairly small so you can maintain it more easily. Unless
your work is graphic design or video production, since your work files will
be much larger.

3.Install a second hard disk on your computer and create at least two
partitions on it, one for your paging file and the other for archiving old
work files and other important files like your Outlook PST file.

4.Create additional partitions on your second disk only if they will contain
files that are infrequently accessed to minimize contention with the paging
file partition.

Whether you use your PC for work or play (or both), partitioning your hard
drives appropriately can help you keep organized. Disk partitioning is
invaluable to me, because I'm a notoriously disorganized person. My desk
tells the tale—piles of paper all over the place, sticky notes attached to
monitors and walls, stacks of open books, and leftover crumbs from snacking.
You can imagine what my hard drives must look like.

What's the value of using my partitioning scheme? Installing the operating
system and applications on a dedicated partition (System) provides these
benefits:
•Makes my computer easier to maintain without worrying about losing work when
things go wrong.

•Need to defragment this partition only after I install a new application,
which is rarely because my computer is dedicated to writing and editing
work, not fun and games (I have other computers for that).

•Can easily use System Restore if something goes wrong so I don't lose time
from my work.

I store all my active work files on drive D and keep the folder structure on
this drive simple: one main folder for each project I'm working on. My Data
partition is fairly small at 2 GB. (This small size usually works unless you
work in video production or graphic design, in which case your work files
may be huge.) The small-sized partition and folder structure help me:
•Find my work quickly and keep it organized.

•Promptly move suspended or inactive projects to the Other partition until I
need them or until they're ready to be archived to the Archive partition.
•Defragment the Data partition more quickly, which further reduces potential
downtime.

Tip: I do use Archive for one standard backup though. I back up my System
partition using Automated System Recovery (ASR) and store this backup on the
Archive partition.

My Archive partition tends to fill up pretty fast however because I am
always saving temporary versions of my work as I go along. So in addition to
having two physical disks on my computer, I also have a CD-R drive that I
use to burn CDs for two purposes:

At the end of each month I copy last month's Archive subfolders to CD, label
it by date, and put it somewhere safe. That way I have last month's backup
ready if both my hard disks fail from a lightning bolt hitting my office, or
my computer is infected with a virus, or a thief steals my computer.

When my Archive partition is approximately 80 percent full, I copy several
months of the oldest backup files to CD and then delete them from the
Archive folder to reclaim space.

Boost performance

Although a PC used for writing doesn't need to be a high-performance
computer, its performance can be improved by a good partitioning scheme. The
biggest boost comes from my Paging partition on drive H, which is found on
my second physical disk. I use this partition to boost performance in the
following ways:

Move the paging file there. A well-known method for improving performance on
a Windows-based computer is to move the paging file (pagefile.sys) from its
usual location on drive C to its own separate partition on a separate
physical drive.

Keep the Paging partition small (4 GB). By default the initial size of your
paging file is 1.5 × RAM and its maximum size is 3 × RAM. So if your
computer has 1 GB of RAM, which is pretty good for a desktop productivity
computer, then setting your Paging partition to 4 GB gives you more than
enough room for your paging file without wasting disk space that could be
used for other purposes like storing data.

Format it using the FAT32 file system. Although the version of NTFS in
Windows XP has features that make it perform better than earlier versions of
NTFS, you can still eek out some performance gains for small volumes by
formatting them as FAT32 instead of NTFS. I'm not overly concerned about the
lack of security from not having pagefile.sys protected by NTFS permissions
since it's an unreadable binary file. If someone hacked into my system, they
wouldn't need to bother with the paging file anyway.

Replace old 5400 rpm drives with newer 7200 or 10000 rpm drives. If you have
the budget, you can speed performance of disk activity by installing one of
these faster drives.

If you have IDE drives, you can also boost file system performance by
setting both physical disks as masters on separate channels. That way data
can flow freely and simultaneously between both disks and the system bus.
This setup allows Windows to access and load system files while
simultaneously paging to disk. The end result—increased performance. Of
course, Paging isn't the only partition I have on my second disk. But since
I only access the Archive and Other partitions only a few times per day, the
disk is pretty much dedicated to paging activity. But overall the biggest
performance gain is usually achieved by moving your paging file to a
partition on a separate drive as described above, especially on a system
that has limited physical memory. Buying more RAM is of course another way
to boost performance.

www.lowster11.com

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www.lowster11.com

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