Do partitions on HDD slow down performance ?

[Noahtuck]

Yeah i know, stupid question but i want to see how many people reply and what they say.


Some local monkey is trying to say it severely hinders your PC's performance & slows it down considerably.

But then again he say's the optimal situation would be to reinstall your OS clean once a month, he actually say's it is recommended!!

[edDV]

Yeah i know, stupid question but i want to see how many people reply and what they say.

Need to know about the appication. Disk seeks are the slow part. If you can concentrate your seeks into a small partition (e.g. the swap file on a separate disk), then that will be better than wide seeks on a large busy drive.

For video, you need to worry about long sequential access. This is a different optimization.

Video sequential access works best with defragmented drives. Partitioning will help with defragmetation time.

What is it that you want to speed up?

[edDV]

Some local monkey is trying to say it severely hinders your PC's performance & slows it down considerably.

But then again he say's the optimal situation would be to reinstall your OS clean once a month, he actually say's it is recommended!!

Slows what down? Disk boots?

Sounds like a gamer. They crash and want a fast reboot.

[Noahtuck]

I have no idea if he is a gamer, i know he's a monkey @$$ed moron!!

He just makes a blanket statement stating what i wrote.

He advertises for PC repair and just say's ALL pc's are slowed down by having partitions on them and just say's PC's should have the OS reinstalled clean once a month and that it is widely recommended.

And he will do this for $30.00 a shot!!



He is always aiming his BS services toward the serious novice majority because other people besides myself have made comments on how it is obvious he does not know as much as he thinks he does.

[yoda313]

optimal situation would be to reinstall your OS clean once a month,

Well the guy would be right if we were all still using WIN98! That sucker crashed frequently - I couldn't keep an install going for more than 6 months without needing to be retooled.

Once win2000 came around and all the subsequent nt based varieties crashes are much more uncommon and infrequent for me personally. (xp and vista are seudo nt platforms right? Or at least take offs of that series right?)

[edDV]

Seems a user can reinstall himself if that was true. Why pay him?

Seems a fear marketing tactic. Again it depends on the application. A public library effectively reinstalls for every new user.

[disturbed1]

Do partitions on HDD slow down performance

The partitions themselves do not cause a performance hit. You can, and will receive a performance hit if frequently accessed data is on a slower partition of the drive. Which partition is fastest depends on the number of heads and platters the hard drive has, and which sectors the partition was created on. I wouldn't exactly call the difference human readable though

The only way I could remotely validate his statement, is if he was talking about file copies. If you copy data from partition 1 to partition 2 of the same hard drive, yes it is slow, really slow. The hard drive has to do a read and write at the same time. Best practice is to read from one physical drive, and write to another. It's a difference of 30MB/s using a single drive 2 partitions compared to 130MB/s*+ using 2 physical drives.


* Of course the speed actually depends on your hardware's disk subsystem - chipset, protocol, HDD robustness.

Seems a user can reinstall himself if that was true. Why pay him?

You'd be surprised if you knew how many times I've been asked and offered money to hit the F8, or some other, key to invoke the OEM restoration process.

[Noahtuck]

Seems a fear marketing tactic.

Exactly, he even offers more than that in what seem's a scare tactic.

I have also seen him offer to put spyware on your PC so you can see what your spouse or other half is doing.

And he is talking about REMOVING partitions so it is one large drive and wiping your pc clean and reinstalling windows once a month.

And he is talking about just PC use in general, he is pushing this on a daily basis towards the novice group.

Because me and some of the other people that have commented on what he writes, know he is just some scamming $h!t head that thinks he is some kind of home grown PC tech in his basement.

[ocgw]

I use all the drive letters in the alphabet from a-z and my HTPC is plenty fast



ocgw

peace

[Noahtuck]

I use all the drive letters in the alphabet from a-z and my HTPC is plenty fast

ocgw

peace

Thats why i said

Yeah i know, stupid question

Because i know partitioning a drive does not adversely effect your drives performance or speed the way he tries to make it sound.

Espc. for the average user.

[redwudz]

What disturbed1 said. I'm not a fan of partitions, particularly on the boot drive as you are still using the same controller and the same channel to move data. Not very efficient. But I have partitioned a 500GB boot drive with a 200GB boot partition and a 300GB storage partition. But I made it clear to the owner that for best disc performance, use the secondary 500GB drive (Not partitioned) for disc intensive video operations and only use the boot archive partition for longer term storage where slower disc access speeds are not a problem.

I personally like to use at least three hard drives. A small 'Boot' and two additional large drives, usually labeled 'Archive' and 'Edit'.

EDIT: When I used W98, I figured on reinstalling the OS about four times a year. I haven't had those problems with XP or Vista. Still, money would be better spent by investing in a program like True Image or Ghost to backup your install than taking your PC to a shop for a complete 'OS reinstall/tuneup'.

And I don't see defragging to be a big issue when dealing with large video files. It was more of a problem with lots of small files. Vista has a auto defragger that seems to work well enough. To me constant defragging is also constant wear on a hard drive. But that's just IMO.

[ocgw]

What disturbed1 said. I'm not a fan of partitions, particularly on the boot drive as you are still using the same controller and the same channel to move data. Not very efficient. But I have partitioned a 500GB boot drive with a 200GB boot partition and a 300GB storage partition. But I made it clear to the owner that for best disc performance, use the secondary 500GB drive (Not partitioned) for disc intensive video operations and only use the boot archive partition for longer term storage where slower disc access speeds are not a problem.

I personally like to use at least three hard drives. A small 'Boot' and two additional large drives, usually labeled 'Archive' and 'Edit'.

EDIT: When I used W98, I figured on reinstalling the OS about four times a year. I haven't had those problems with XP or Vista. Still, money would be better spent by investing in a program like True Image or Ghost to backup your install than taking your PC to a shop for a complete 'OS reinstall/tuneup'.

And I don't see defragging to be a big issue when dealing with large video files. It was more of a problem with lots of small files. Vista has a auto defragger that seems to work well enough. To me constant defragging is also constant wear on a hard drive. But that's just IMO.

Even tho' I am using every letter in the alphabet for drive partitions you will notice most of my storage partitons are in the 500-700GB range, that is so if a portion of the drive becomes corrupted I only lose a partition of files instead of the whole drive, in almost 2 years running my current HTPC I have lost 1 partition w/ about 20 blu ray on it, never a whole drive worth of data

The 50GB partitons are OS/apps/My Documents and temp working /editing partitons reserved @ the outside edge of the discs where they are fastest

ocgw

peace

[Bjs]

Truly a simple scam aimed at novice computer owners.

Transferring data from one partition to another on the same drive dose increase time for transferring but remember most new brand named pcs come with multiple partitions containing, os, recovery partition, user data storage partition ... they vary amongst manufacturers.

In fact this actually improves performance for system utilities such as scan disk, defrag, disk cleanup as the whole drive is not involved.

I myself use a second partition to store temporary data for authoring dvd's, programing, ect ... in the end once emptied, the utilites only take seconds to clean up.

As for the reload of the operating system once a month ... it is an utter joke ... scam... it would be more or less on average that this is performed annually by most users.

Ive been in the computer business for over 20 years and have used all the ms operating systems ... never had issues with win98 / se ... very stable yet outdated.

I have at times heard from those having completed IT training making ludicrous statements such as microsoft never made windows 98 ... you have to laugh sometimes

[edDV]

Today most of these issues are not noticed. 15 years ago we got to watch all this play out in slow motion. Very slow motion.

[lordsmurf]

If accessing both at same time, sure. There really aren't many reasons to partition, to be fully honest. Those days are gone.

It's not much different than scare tactics about how your VHS tapes are dying on the shelf. It's marketing horseshit.

Same for "archival gold" media, or "DVD safe" markers. Stupid products for stupid people.

[rallynavvie]

There really aren't many reasons to partition, to be fully honest. Those days are gone.

I tend to agree. Several years ago when HDD space was still a premium and we had numerous unstable Windows builds prior to good AV programs going out then they were a great thing to have. Our enterprise systems are still single drive with two partitions so that they can be re-imaged without losing user files. But the reason enterprise users re-image instead of resolve their issues is because of cost of desktop support and the easy fix that is "re-image your machine".

But with drives these days being dirt cheap I don't see why people don't just load up on physical drives instead of partition out their drives. If it's for sorting purposes to keep things organized that might be useful but folders have worked well enough for most people. I have 10 drives (7volumes) in my case right now and several more mapped network drives and that's quite enough for me.

I do get a kick out of the few folks that JBOD and then partition that array

[ocgw]

There really aren't many reasons to partition, to be fully honest. Those days are gone.

I tend to agree. Several years ago when HDD space was still a premium and we had numerous unstable Windows builds prior to good AV programs going out then they were a great thing to have. Our enterprise systems are still single drive with two partitions so that they can be re-imaged without losing user files. But the reason enterprise users re-image instead of resolve their issues is because of cost of desktop support and the easy fix that is "re-image your machine".

But with drives these days being dirt cheap I don't see why people don't just load up on physical drives instead of partition out their drives. If it's for sorting purposes to keep things organized that might be useful but folders have worked well enough for most people. I have 10 drives (7volumes) in my case right now and several more mapped network drives and that's quite enough for me.

I do get a kick out of the few folks that JBOD and then partition that array

I have 8 internal HDD's and 1 usb external in the main PC (9.36TB), 3 HDD in the backup PC (1.64), & 1 HDD in my 3rd PC

On my main PC I have 4 1500GB HDD's, they will hold about 70-75 uncompressed blu ray movies each, I typically break them up into 3 partitions, if a drive becomes corrupted, I need to reformat the corrupted partitions portion of the HDD only (so far I have had to back up 1 partition)

I leave the small 750GB and 640GB HDD's unpartitioned

I had this 1 movie sitting on bad sector corrupting the movie, copying the movie back to the same spot produces a unreadable file pointing out a bad sector, fortunately this sector was repairable by reformating, I had to transfer all the other movies off the drive, reformat the partition, and replace the data, this would have been much more time consuming, had I not used partitions

ps. I always put My Documents on its own partition on my clients PC's, they can trash the OS, and their documents are safe

ocgw

peace

[AlanHK]

If you have a really serious crash -- say from physical error on the hard disk, bad RAM, power spike; you can trash whatever files are open, and even the partition table.

However, the damage should be limited to whatever files were open at the time, and files on partitions not in use then should be safe.

Also giving the Windows OS its own partition for its system files makes it easier to make a clean image of that partition once you've got it set up, and if it gets trashed/infected later, you can re-image it, while your documents and other data remain on another partition.

But I wouldn't do this once a month, that's nutty, unless it's a public access PC that bored kids play with. If you need to do that, better to lock it down so users can't change anything.

[smegma11]

I don't know what he's selling but I do like doing what he's selling. I do installs that work good, make an image and re-install them every few weeks to get rid of any garbage that has creeped in like ASK toolbar from Adobe or spam like that.
A far as partition speed, I think he's 100% correct. If I file copy movies onto a single partition drive it will copy at around 120 mbs. If I have created a second partition on the drive and try to copy to it, it will copy at 65 mbs. I have gotten rid of all partitions, as convenient as they are, and opted for speed.

[Constant Gardener]

I have multiple partitions on multiple drives. They work. So does the Windows 7 that I installed four years ago. I do get calls from a foreign-sounding gent who insists that my computer is full of malware, but I ignore him.

[bendixG15]

Why am I here ?? It's FIVE years old. Bye