Installing Windows 7 and partitioning a 1TB drive

[berlin88]

I am looking to use my 1TB seagate SATA II drive for my Windows 7 installation, and was wondering how I should go about partitioning it and how large each partition should be or what I sould put on each partition.

My system will be used for the following:

Computer Games that take up a lot of space (World In Conflict, Empire Total War, Battlefield 2, Call of Duty, etc.)
Music
Video files/ recordings (I have a Hauppauge tv card)
Some Photos
Basic apps like office
Data files

Which of the above items should I put on the OS partition, and which should get their own partitions? How large should the OS partition be compared to the other partitions? Seperate partition for games?

Having one giant drive might be nice to try, but then I would have no where to put my excess video files if I ever needed to reformat. The 1TB drive accomodates whatever video files I can't store on my 2 smaller drives and currently has 120 GB of video on it.



In addition to my 1TB drive, I also have 2 more internal drives, a 250GB Maxtor ATA which is filled with video files and a 200GB WD SATA that I use for my TV card and storing the recordings I make until I have a chance to edit them or move them to a differet drive.

I have a seperate 250GB external drive for backing up data files and music, so the backup issue is taken care of.

 

[Uber Philf]

This is how i would do it.

O.S Partition of roughly 250GB:

Some Photos
Basic apps like office
Data files

On separate partition, of roughly 750GB:

Separate folders on the partition for each type.

Computer Games that take up a lot of space (World In Conflict, Empire Total War, Battlefield 2, Call of Duty, etc.)
Music
Video files/ recordings (I have a Hauppauge tv card)


Just my opinion.

 

[Qdos]

Just use it for video/PVR storage, unpartitioned, as that's by far the biggest data hog

Run Windows7 from another disk, keep yet another for 'My Documents'...

 

[berlin88]

This is how i would do it.

O.S Partition of roughly 250GB:

Some Photos
Basic apps like office
Data files

On separate partition, of roughly 750GB:

Separate folders on the partition for each type.

Computer Games that take up a lot of space (World In Conflict, Empire Total War, Battlefield 2, Call of Duty, etc.)
Music
Video files/ recordings (I have a Hauppauge tv card)


Just my opinion.

Most of my data files are just the usual things you put in the my documents area like word files, excel files, music, pics, etc. Some sites I have looked at said 100-150GB for the OS partition was enough if there are no games installed on that partition.

Will having a lot of video files on the same partition as the games cause any performance issues?

Additionally, whenever I reformat the OS partition, I tend to reformat the games partition as well, so I was thinking that maybe a 3rd partition just for music/ video would be a good idea?

OS, Apps, Data on Partition 1, Games on Partition 2 and Music/ video on partition 3?

Just use it for video/PVR storage, unpartitioned, as that's by far the biggest data hog

Run Windows7 from another disk, keep yet another for 'My Documents'...

My other 2 drives are only 250GB ATA and 200GB SATA, and they are 4-5 years old , so the Seagate drive is by far superior in performance compared to the other two. Windows 7 on an old ATA would be rather slow and the 200GB SATA would be to small, unless games went on a different drive.