are the days of separating OS partition and data partition over?

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  1. Posts : 450
    Windows 7
    Thread Starter
       #11

    seavixen32 said:
    Well, all I can say is, you do your thing and I'll do mine. :)

    After all, it's just a matter of personal choice really.
    Agreed. But, I think this discussion is worth having. It's very pertinent as things have dramatically changed hardware-wise in the last few years. SSD, USB 3.0, dirt-cheap (I mean cheaper than dirt) hard drive (prior to the Taiwan thing).

    You know, have a shutdown .bat that you run you start before going to bed. It images the world and then shuts down.
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  2. Posts : 5,795
    Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1
       #12

    SSDs are yet another reason to keep things separated. No need to junk up an SSD and give it unnecessary reads and writes.

    You are hung up on the speed of transfers, instead of looking at the practicality of the processes. Just because I can back up data faster now than several years ago, doesn't mean I should or need to completely reorganize the way I store my data.
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  3. Posts : 450
    Windows 7
    Thread Starter
       #13

    DeaconFrost said:
    SSDs are yet another reason to keep things separated. No need to junk up an SSD and give it unnecessary reads and writes.

    You are hung up on the speed of transfers, instead of looking at the practicality of the processes. Just because I can back up data faster now than several years ago, doesn't mean I should or need to completely reorganize the way I store my data.
    TIF are the only thing I can think off offhand that are "unnecessary" reads/writes for an SSD.

    Remember, if you're going to back up your data once per week, as an example, and it's 500G or even 1TB, dragging along the OS partition (or equivalent if we're on 1 partition for everything) is no biggie. A few extra minutes.

    I'm not hung up on speed. I have thought about this and can't see a reason to not combine the two for having 1 and only 1 thing to worry about: backing up your "system". I'm also not suggesting anyone reorganize data. But, on a new install, it makes less and less sense to keep things partitioned (based on the caveats in my OP).
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  4. Posts : 5,795
    Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1
       #14

    Let me clarify at this point that I'm playing the Devil's Advocate. I'm not saying you are wrong...I'm saying that what you feel is best for you may not be what's best for others....so these proclamation type threads always backfire. As long as you are backing up what is important to you, stick with it. I don't preach my methods because they work for me, but may not fit with what anyone else is doing or wanting to do.
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  5. Posts : 450
    Windows 7
    Thread Starter
       #15

    DeaconFrost said:
    Let me clarify at this point that I'm playing the Devil's Advocate. I'm not saying you are wrong...I'm saying that what you feel is best for you may not be what's best for others....so these proclamation type threads always backfire. As long as you are backing up what is important to you, stick with it. I don't preach my methods because they work for me, but may not fit with what anyone else is doing or wanting to do.
    *sigh* It's not a proclamation. I posed a QUESTION in my OP. I'm also not preaching anything other than asking questions.
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  6. Posts : 3,960
    W7 x64
       #16

    Although I do not *see* the phrase *drive imaging* in the opening post, yes, even now you can store your data in the Windows default profile folders and specifically back them up to another medium in case of data loss... and if you did then you could instruct a drive imaging program to ignore those folders and their content when making images of the OS...

    However it would require a boot drive of a sufficient capacity; and unless money is no object then few people are going to have 500Gb-1Tb-2Tb type SSD's!!! If you're not using an SSD then it stands to reasons the more R/W I/O operations there are on the boot drive regards personal data, the slower the OS will respond...

    For these reasons I suspect it's a "no brainer" in truth...
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  7. Posts : 7,730
    Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-Bit
       #17

    Don't forget, a lot of people don't have SSDs, USB3 ports and such like.

    I'm sure the question you ask has some merit, but I just don't happen to think the days of separating the operating system and personal data are over.
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  8. Posts : 450
    Windows 7
    Thread Starter
       #18

    Qdos said:
    Although I do not *see* the phrase *drive imaging* in the opening post, yes, even now you can store your data in the Windows default profile folders and specifically back them up to another medium in case of data loss... and if you did then you could instruct a drive imaging program to ignore those folders and their content when making images of the OS...

    However it would require a boot drive of a sufficient capacity; and unless money is no object then few people are going to have 500Gb-1Tb-2Tb type SSD's!!! If you're not using an SSD then it stands to reasons the more R/W I/O operations there are on the boot drive regards personal data, the slower the OS will respond...

    For these reasons I suspect it's a "no brainer" in truth...
    How much read/write activity related to one's data would have to be going on to slow down the OS? Even if you're listening to music the whole time, that stuff is destaged from the platter into controller cache via read-ahead. How many I/Os are your systems generally doing as you do your daily work?

    Again, with huge (massive) data sizes, I can see the point of having multiple physical drives (but still not multiple physical partitions).
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  9. Posts : 5,795
    Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1
       #19

    JimLewandowski said:
    Again, with huge (massive) data sizes, I can see the point of having multiple physical drives (but still not multiple physical partitions).
    I'm not sure what this has to do with partitions, but I'll go back to a comment I made before. Who *doesn't* have a large amount of data anymore? Even on my corporate laptop, I have a second partition created to be D...as in my user data. I do this for the very same reasons I mentioned before. In both of my tower computers, I have at least two physical drives. One for the OS/Apps, and one for my user data. In the tower in my sig, I have three. One for OS/apps, one for data, and one as a scratch area for my DVD ripping, as I'm converting many of my DVDs into movie files and storing them on my server.
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  10. Posts : 1,114
    Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
       #20

    Just for thought, if i put all my stuff which is spread over 5 different drives, i would have to backup 500+ gigs. How long do you think it would take to back up that much data, we're talking hours. So for me the OS 33 gigs is maybe 20 minutes at most, seems like a nobrainer to me, i can be back up and running in 20 minutes if need be. Just my 2 cents
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