Advantages of Multi-Partition Drives

Advantage #1: A hard drive containing multiple partitions allows you to *lower* your drive's effective access time, providing you with a more responsive system.

If you create a partition at the outer/leading edge of your drive (*1), and install your operating system & applications there .. and use the inner/slower parts of the disk for storing files that don't require access during normal system operating (i.e. downloads, drivers, back-ups, Ghost images, etc.) .. you'll limit/restrict your drive's seeks to the fastest part of the drive.

(*1) - the first partition you create on a drive will automatically take the outer/leading/fastest edge. Here's a photo of a hard drive's intenals, for those of you who are visually-oriented:

In other words, the drive's read/write heads won't have to travel (seek) to the far end of the drive (during normal system usage, anyway). This will provide you with a more responsive system by decreasing the drive's effective seek/access time.

You can verify this by partitioning your drive as I described. A much quicker method however, would be by using the hard drive benchmarking utility HD Tach, which contains a setting called Advanced Size Check (ASC).

If you put a checkmark in the ASC box, HD Tach will benchmark your *entire* drive. But .. if you remove the check, HD Tach will *truncate* the test at the first 8GB.

In other words, HD Tach will only benchmark the first 8 gigs. Notice how your *reported* access times are improved (lower) when HD Tach truncates the test at the first 8 gigs. This is cuz the read/write heads don't have travel all the way to the far end of the drive (inner tracks).

A drive with a larger capacity will notice a more dramatic 'truncating' effect. For example, 8 gigs is roughly 40% of a 20-gig drive. But it's less than 1% of a 320-gig drive. In other words, you can limit your drive's travel (seeks) to the fastest 1% of a 320-gig drive by creating an 20-or 25-gig partition and storing only your operating system & applications there.

It's common knowledge that a drive with the same amount of data will 'feel' more responsive on a *larger* drive than a smaller one .. even tho both drives may have *identical* manufacturer's performance specs.

This is cuz the data on the larger drive will be limited to a smaller area. This is also one of the reasons why larger drives feel faster, even tho they have the exact same manufacturer specs as the smaller one. It's cuz the larger drive has a lower effective seek time.

This is also why disk management utilities such as Norton's SpeedDisk, which comes with Norton Utilities (which comes as part of Norton System Works), places the swap file at the drive's leading edge. The engineers at Norton/Symantec know that's where the fastest part of the disk is located, and they realize that putting your swap file there will improve your system's performance.

If you install your operating system to a single, large partition, there's nothing to prevent both system & program files, over time, from winding up at the far end of the drive (Windows updates, program updates, driver updates, etc.).

System and program files that wind up at the far end of the drive take longer to access, and are transferred at a slower rate, which translates into a less-responsive system. If you look at the graph of sustained transfer rates (STRs) from the HD Tach benchmark posted here, you'll see clearly that the outermost sectors of the drive transfer data the fastest.

In this case - that of a 120-GB IBM 120GXP, the transfer rate is roughly 50MB/s at the outer edge. But it's less than half that, or ~20MB/s, at the inner tracks. This is because the linear velocity of the discs are faster at the *outer* tracks.

If you've ever played on a merry-go-round, you understand this concept. You move much faster standing at the outer edge, compared to the center. You will find that most hard drives, regardless of size, exhibit similar performance characteristics (faster near the outer-beginning, slower at the inner-end).

Faster linear velocity means that more data passes under the read/write heads per unit time. This is another way of saying higher data transfer rate (which is simply another way of saying 'faster').

Access times are the #1 factor for determining how well a hard drive will perform, when we talk about running an operating system & applications. For example, check out [here] what the StorageReview has to say about seek/access times:

"...STR had relatively little effect upon overall drive performance. Today, it should be clear that steadily increasing transfer rates have in effect "written themselves out" of the performance equation ... it should be clear that random access time is vastly more important than sequential transfer rate when it comes to typical disk performance ... Thus, the reordered "hierarchy" of important quantifiable specs would read:

• Seek Time
• Spindle Speed
• Buffer Size
• Data Density

In other words, it doesn't matter how high of a transfer rate a drive can *sustain* .. if it's spending all it's time *seeking*. A Ferrari won't do you much good if you have to keep stopping at each red light in town. The car will never be able to 'get up to speed'. It's not the best example, but it might help you understand the underlying principle.

Keeping your frequently-accessed files close to the drive's leading edge will improve both access times *and* sustained transfer rates for files stored there. Have I rode this horse into the ground yet? You can't imagine how many people argue with basic disk drive performance factors.

This is also why Seagate is shrinking the platter size of it's best-performing Cheetah line from the industry standard 3.5-inch to 2.5-inch. The way the read/write heads don't have as far to seek. That's one less inch to cover, which means better drive performance, all other things being equal.

You can also see for yourself the effect upgrading/updating your O/S (Windows) has on system performance. Most good defraggers, such as PerfectDisk and Diskeeper, allow you view your drive as a color-coded map (62-KB).

Over time, notice what happens to your system and program files after they're updated. Gradually they will fragment and move to slower areas of the drive (represented by longer seeks and slower x-fer rates).

You don't even have to purchase one of these defraggers. Simply download the demo, defrag your drive, and then update your O/S and some programs. Watch the colors change. A small partition at the beginning of your disk will confine these high-use files to this fastest part and prevent them from winding up down at the slow end.

If you have only a single large partition, your program files will wind up being spread out all over your hard drive as you continue to download and install program updates. There is no way to stop this from occurring.

Each time you launch a program, your heads will have to seek all over the drive (including to the far/slow end) to retrieve these files, slowing down your system.

My Advice: Run you own benchmarks and you'll see what I mean. If you want to learn more about hard drive performance factors, check out this article posted at the Storagereview (reprinted from the PC Guide).

Zippier performance from your disk-storage system however, is not the main reason people multi-partition their drives. If you *really* want better performance from your disk storage system, get yourself a 10K-rpm Raptor, or better yet, a 15K-rpm SCSI beast.

Personally, I advocate the use of a small, fast drive to run your O/S and apps, and a large, slow drive for (cheap) mass storage. Your 50-gigs of MP3s don't need to be stored on an expensive, high-performance drive.

All things being equal, more (physical) drives means better performance. So, if performance isn't the primary reason for partitioning your hard drive into multiple partitions, what is?

Advantage #2: The main reason people prefer a drive with multiple partitions over one with only a single large partition is because having a separate system partition, containing only your operating system (Windows) and programs, allows you to reformat your system partition (should something go horribly wrong with Windows) and reinstall Windows without losing all the data on the drive.

Personally, I use a 20-GB system partition. It contains about 12-GB of data. I install no games here or multi-CD programs, such a Microsoft Encarta. Even 25- or 30-GB wouldn't be a bad idea. But I would go no larger than 30-GB, and no smaller than 12-GB.

This advantage goes hand-in-hand with Advantage #4 on the next page.

Note: if you run out of space on your system drive, you can usually reclaim some by deleting the uninstall files in your \Windows directory. These typically begin with "NT$..." I have done this myself with no problem.

After deleting these files, you won't be able to uninstall the associated updates, but you shouldn't need to, especially if you back-up your system drive with Norton Ghost, or some other imaging software. Alternately, you can *move* these files to another drive, in case you don't use an imaging software.

You can also delete files in your \TEMP directory. In Windows XP > Documents and Settings \ Your User Name \ Local Settings \ Temp. I have deleted these myself many times with no adverse effects. You can also emply your recycle bin.

Advantage #3: A drive with multiple partitions allows you to defrag only those partitions that actually need defragging. This saves wear and tear on your drive, and may even help keep it from failing prematurely.

Some users advocate creating a small partition specifically for files that fragment easily. Then they move all these easily-fragmented files and directories there. This keeps your other volumes/drives from fragmenting as much, and makes defragging easier/faster/quicker. I think this is a good idea.

It can take hours to defrag 320-GB worth of fragmented data, not to mention 500 gigs, or 750 gigs. This means you have to plan your defrags much more carefully than you do with a drive containing smaller, multiple partitions. A small partition can be defragged in the time it takes to visit the bathroom.

Single-partition advocates claim that they defrag *overnight*. This is fine, but it needn't be that way. And you shouldn't have to run your PC all night if you don't want to. You shouldn't have to wait until bedtime before defragging, cuz your drive will take hours to finish. And you shouldn't have to defrag 320 gigs worth of data when only a small percentage of it is actually fragmented.

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