Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014

Lady Fitzgerald said:

Arelem said:

Lady Fitzgerald said:

I'm assuming you're using drive and partition interchangeably in which case, read LMiller7's post about using folders instead of partitions.

Since the partitions are seen as drives D, G and H by the computer, that's how I refer to them. I also saw the post about folders. I'd rather not dig through a folder tree to get to what I want. If I want a DWG file I created, I click G:, then DWGs.

One additional folder in string is that big a deal? If so, just make a shortcut for your final destination.

I don't like cluttering my desktop up with shortcuts.

I don't like cluttering my desktop up with shortcuts.

I don't like cluttering up my hard drive with partitions.

Folders are a far more flexible organizational technique than partitions.

With partitions you must decide up front how many you will have, where they will be placed, and what sizes they will be. Later changes to partitions are problematic, may require third party tools, and are very restricted in scope. Movement of data between partitions is very time consuming for large files.

Folders can be added, moved, and deleted at any time as circumstances change. Files or folders can be quickly moved anywhere within a volume. The data itself doesn't move, only a few pointers in the folders that contain them. NTFS adds some other things I won't go into at this time.

Lady Fitzgerald said:

LMiller7 said:

I don't like cluttering my desktop up with shortcuts.

I don't like cluttering up my hard drive with partitions.

Folders are a far more flexible organizational technique than partitions.

With partitions you must decide up front how many you will have, where they will be placed, and what sizes they will be. Later changes to partitions are problematic, may require third party tools, and are very restricted in scope. Movement of data between partitions is very time consuming for large files.

Folders can be added, moved, and deleted at any time as circumstances change. Files or folders can be quickly moved anywhere within a volume. The data itself doesn't move, only a few pointers in the folders that contain them. NTFS adds some other things I won't go into at this time.

At the risk of sounding repetitious, .

The 2 of you are right ol' grouches aren't you?

All I did was express what worked for me, I didn't belittle or criticize others choices or opinions. But me? You just keep coming back with a "you are so stupid to do it that way" attitude because it doesn't conform to YOUR opinion.

Tell me if I'm wrong, but I thought these forums were for folks to express their experience and opinions to help others. The 2 of you appear to be attempting to shut down any of that which does not agree with what you feel is the proper opinion or experience.

To quote another poster "...That tells me straight away that you have your opinion and woe betide the person who even goes close to disagreeing with you..."

I never said or meant to imply that anyone was stupid. If using multiple partitions works for you, great. I myself use 2 partitions, one for the OS and applications and one for my own files. I have been doing this for many years and it works well for me. But this isn't something I would recommend to others for general use. I have seen many cases where multiple partitions are created but the user accepts defaults for everything and the C drive becomes full while D is almost empty.

Also be aware that this is a public forum where all posts will be accessible for years to come by anyone with an Internet connection. Most doing so will not be members of this forum. I wanted to be sure that all readers understood that the use of partitions was not the normal organizational method but one that has some serious problems. The use of folders is usually preferred. This had nor been previously mentioned in this thread and I thought an important point. I did say that there were legitimate exceptions.

Hi there

I've given up using Discrete volumes such as "D","E","F" etc apart from "C" which is an SSD and where I have my OS installed.

I'm simply using pools of volumes as "Storage Spaces" so I don't care where the data physically resides. HDD's are plenty reliable these days - and if you've got backup then it's no problem either to recover / re-create your data.

The advantage with "Storage spaces" also is that you can have very large libraries / data spaces for data bases - for example you can have say a library of several TB of music files / video files even if you only have several discrete 500 GB and 320 GB HDD's.

With Storage spaces you can dynamically ADD more volumes if you want to.

The Storage spaces I think is a Windows 8 / 8.1 feature - but you can use Libraries in W7 to achieve the same result - I think the Storage spaces though is far better implemented and it really is seamless - Windows explorer just treats the storage space as one big HDD.

(You can have several storage spaces if you want too).

Cheers
jimbo