Partitioning Your Drive – How do you feel?

[DirtRider]

Multi Partitioning Your Drive – How do you feel?

I was just wondering how you all feel about [FONT=&quot][/FONT]multi partitioning your drives. I normally don’t do it but prefer to have another drive installed for data and backups

 

[derekimo]

Too much real estate on my 1tb drive, I've got a dual boot and a data and media partition. I have an external for backups.

 

[The Howling Wolves]

I'm from the real OLD School.
I have never partitioned my drive as I never had a need for doing it.

 

[pparks1]

Always if it's a 1 drive computer. This way you can put your data and files on the second partition and reload or reimage the OS to the main partition. External drives work for this as well.....but to me, it's worth have the space right inside of the computer and not having to wait for the data to stop copying.

 

[noyb]

Since I carry more than 200gig of personal data stored ..
I always partition my HD and put ALL my Data in a different partition than my System.
It makes maintaining and restoring the small System Partition a lot easier and faster.

I also have more than one HD installed ..
The second is a bootable twin to the working HD .. for an installed backup.

 

[mitchell65]

I'm from the real OLD School.
I have never partitioned my drive as I never had a need for doing it.

+1 ccccccccc

 

[Lasy B]

Always. I can find my stuff faster and it's safely out of the reach of Windows crashes.

 

[whs]

Well, the first thing I always do is to seperate my user data from the OS partition. Then I have a partition with which I experiment, a video partition, a backup partition, a couple of operating systems, etc. How would one do that without partitioning. On this system here I have 3 drives - but this is the maximum I can fit into this dumb Dell box - unless I want to employ more velcro.

 

[alphanumeric]

I don't, but I'm debating doing it on my next clean install. I have all my stuff backed up to an external drive and another PC so it's not a big deal having to copy it back to this PC it windows craps out on me. My last couple of failures were hard drives so it wouldn't have mattered anyway.

 

[curtiswardwell]

To partiton or not to partition

I prefer to use exteran hd or jump drive. If your system crashed or hd fail then you are out of luck. If you do partiton just keep an extra backup on anohter medium

 

[fireberd]

I've never partitioned and I've been working with PC's that have hard drives since DOS 2. I currently have a 1TB drive for Windows 7. I have a second internal 750GB drive that I do full hard drive backups with Acronis True Image software.

Old, slow computers, required a lot of time just to defrag a 10GB hard drive. That is not the case any longer, and the OS could care less where the data is - it just knows it's on the hard drive.

Like someone else mentioned, if the hard drive crashed everything is lost, if it's not backed up somewhere else.

 

[DeaconFrost]

These questions always make me laugh a little when I see the never option. You have to partition a drive, or else it won't be usable.

Anyway, it depends for me. if it is a single drive system, like my laptop, I alway cut off a D drive for storage. I don't ever both with redirection...I just store things on the D drive. On a tower that has two drives, which is preferable...I don't. I use the smallest for the OS and the largest for data. For example, in my current home system, i have identical WD drives, except one is 320 GB and one is 640 GB. The 320 GB is C and the other is D.

 

[Tweek]

I don't bother with it. If you have to transfer something from one "Drive" to another, it's just fragmenting it up a bit and it's quite slow... Currently I have:

(C: ) 2x OCZ Vertex Series SATA II 60Gb, RAID0 for OS,
(I: ) 2x WD Raptor SATA II 150GB RAID0 For Programs,
(B: ) & (D: ) 2x Western Digital WD10EACS 1Tb For Storage,
(K: ) 1x Seagate 500Gb SATA II for Computer Utilities and Photos,
(H: ) 2x Western Digital Caviar 20Gb RAID0 for FTP & Audio Console Backup,
(J: ) 1x Seagate 200Gb SATA II for Virtual Machine, (OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard)
(F: ) 1x Seagate 320Gb SATA II for .ISO Files and Remote Image Backup of my Laptop,
And
(G: ) 1x WD Caviar Black 500Gb in an eSATA External Caddy for System Image Backup.

Partitions..? We don't need to Stinkin Partitions!

 

[DirtRider]

Apologies to all for the way this question was presented, I have now changed it to reflect "Do you multi partition your drives?"

 

[Barman58]

I follow the general rule that others appear to here - on a single drive, I separate the OS and data. If there are multiple drives I tend to use complete drives though I will for example partition a 500 GB drive that is just for the OS - Unused space is wasted space.

Also for a system with two Identical 500 GB drives I would partition out the OS drive to free some space and create a small partition on the non OS drive for a scratch area to locate the swapfiles.

All this is of course backed up partition by partition to an external (except the scratch drive)

I have also in the past created cloned copies of the OS drive on either a second drive or partition to allow fast OS failure recovery.

Oh and I sometimes create a boot partition for multi-OS systems (like MS does with win7 - but I did it first )

 

[Atin90]

Safety first

I have found that having 2 hard drives of approximately same size with each divided into two partitions is the best way to go because....

Drive 1 will have the OS in a 32gb partition that is more than enough for almost all programs that one may use even with 64bit OS (this does not apply if you install large games), including Microsoft Office.

The rest of the drive holds data partition that should have an user section and folder for all masters of programs that you install. The drive should be large enough to hold even the OS image and any other images of CD/DVD masters, just in case you loose them. Also images of the running OS should be stored here for quick OS restore.

Drive 2 will be a duplicate of drive 1. This is is important for situation where drive 1 goes bad. Even the OS should be here and in running condition in the partition 1.

Sync program should be used to sync the two drives very frequently to keep it updated just in case.


Even with 2 drives, a additional offline backup should be made of both the OS and the data partitions of drive 1.

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

I have created a partition or two.

​

 

[Joan Archer]

I voted sometimes as it's not something that I did to begin with as I've never had a large drive in any of the machines I've had,

When I had my WinME machine that had an 80GB drive and I did partition that so I could dual boot WinME with my retail copy of XP.

The machine I have now came with Vista on a 250GB drive and I partitioned it so I could install Windows 7 and dual boot.

I don't go into Vista now and when I've plucked up enough courage I will be getting rid of Vista and giving Windows 7 the whole 250GB's, I do have a 500GB external drive that I do system images on every Friday evening with Acronis TI

 

[DeaconFrost]

Drive 2 will be a duplicate of drive 1. This is is important for situation where drive 1 goes bad. Even the OS should be here and in running condition in the partition 1.

Sync program should be used to sync the two drives very frequently to keep it updated just in case.

Except that doesn't work, because the boot sector isn't copied across, and you are at the mercy of the sync program. There are also several flaws with that system as well, such as a malware infection could grab both drives and infect them. The key to remember is that a backup is never kept "live" with the system. It seems common around here, unfortunately, but you're over thining and over-complicating your recovery.

If you really want to keep that Drive 1 safe, use an external drive of a size large enough to hold a drive image of Drive 1, and set it to backup on a schedule. I have two physical drives in my system. The primary is for the OS and apps, while the second is for my user data. I keep an image, done weekly of the primary, and keep everything on my D drive also copied over to my server. I have options for restoration, and neither backup option is kept on my computer. That's the key.

 

[Atin90]

DeaconFrost,

I do understand that the boot sector is not copied using a simple sync program and besides, that would not realy work anyway. A imaging program is needed and most of imaging programs have some capabilities of copying the boot MBR. True Image is one that I use and it works just fine for the MBR.