What are your partitions?

[Kaitlyn]

For those of you that have a partitioned/multiple drives (which all of you should! :)), how is yours organized?

I'm moving to a single SATA drive and will have my Windows install, and then partitions mainly for organizational sake:
- Files
- Server files (my development work)
- Downloads
- Media (music, movies, pictures)

[Amourek]

2 partitions. One for Windows & programs so I can wipe it without losing any data, and the other for everything else (organized by folders). No point in having more partitions on the same drive unless there's something you do that heavily fragments the drive and you want to seperate that.

[Rayblue88]

Partition 2 drives like this.
one for windows/programs/

second one for all your important files, mp3, movies, documents, etc.

if something happens to the first drive, simply fix/reinstall without harming your important files. Second drive with all your important files will not be touched(hopefully not) lol :)

[board123]

Drive 1 (160 GB):
- Vista + programs
- VMware systems (XP Pro)
- Ubuntu

Drive 2 (250 GB):
- All my data files

Drive 3 (320 GB eSATA):
- Backup of Vista + programs (aka C: drive)
- Backup of Drive 2
- Miscellaneous storage

[Digital_Domain]

Drive 1 (36GB):
- WinXP
- VMware
- Programs/some important files

Drive 2 (160GB):
- Random files ->scripts/code/video editing/VM backups
- Drive 1 images

Drive 3&4 (300GB - RAID 1):
- Music/Movies/Games

I really need to reinstall Windows and dual boot with Ubuntu, and get all my files organized.

[jollyeskimo]

Bah, I need another 500GB or two... burning stuff onto DVD's is getting really old. What with the rise of hidef videos, the drives are getting filled up faster and faster.


HDD 1 [sata 300GB]Partition 1 (45.6% full): System (100GB) - OS, programs
Partition 2 (98.1% full): Storage (179GB) - Games, anime, photos, torrents

HDD 2 [sata 320GB]Partition 1 (89.2% full): Aux Storage - ISO's, movies, mp3's, setup exe's

HDD 3 [sata 500GB]Partition 1 (82.8% full): Shows / Car Shows

HDD 4 [unplugged sata hotswap 160GB]Partition 1 (20.1% full): Tertiary offline mp3 backup

[Negotiator]

2 drives, 5 partitions.

Drive 1 - 250gb

Partition 1 30gb, in FAT32 to be accessible from DOS (just in case)
-Windows XP
-All programs
Makes it easy to do reinstall of windows

Partition 2 31gb
-Documents and all files that are changed frequently enough
Makes it easy to backup all important files

Partition 3 172gb
-Storage. All archives and video files go here.

Drive 2 - 80gb
Partition 1 30gb in FAT32
-Unused at the time, wanted to set up another Windows or Linux
-All programs that would be installed for that version of OS

Partition 2 - 48Gb
-Music only. No particular reason for doing so.

[smuncky]

320gb drive, 4 partitions

partition 1 - 63 gb
-windows xp/program files/some music/documents

partition 2 - 156 gb
-music only

partition 3 - 48.8 gb
-games only

partition 4 - 29.3 gb
-movie downloads (dvds mostly)

[Kaitlyn]

320gb drive, 4 partitions

partition 1 - 63 gb
-windows xp/program files/some music/documents

partition 2 - 156 gb
-music only

partition 3 - 48.8 gb
-games only

partition 4 - 29.3 gb
-movie downloads (dvds mostly)


DVDs mostly on a 30GB drive!? BAH!

[ineedaname]

I don't see a point to having more than 2 partitions on a disk ever.

With a single drive Keeping windows on one partion makes sense. On the other hand adding needless partitions will make you end up losing space to the partitioning. It also makes things slower when you move things from partition to partition.

I have 2 drives one 80gb raptor which i keep windows on and a second drive for files.

Sometimes i see some people going partition crazy and it boggles me why they do it. That's what folders are for.

Unless you're using it for a seperate os install or for a mac there's really no point.

[bionicbadger]

1 500gb partition for everything.

[board123]

1 500gb partition for everything.
That's just asking for trouble unless you're frequently backing up your stuff elsewhere.

[sxz]

Desktop 200GB: [C:] System and Apps 60GB [D:] Everything Else 140GB
Laptop 120GB: [C:] System and Apps 60GB [D:] Everything Else 60GB
External 500GB: [E:] Data Backup 380GB [F:] Desktop Backup 60GB [G:] Laptop Backup 60GB

Both [D:] partitions and [E:] are synced and everything else is as listed.

[ct027]

Desktop:
Drive 1:
Partition 1 (20GB): XP & Programs
Partition 2 (20GB): Music and Pictures

Drive 2:
Partition 1 (40GB): All archived files including music and pictures

Drive 3 (External, which I don't have yet)
Partition 1 ( ? ) : Backup of Drive 2

Laptop
Drive 1:
Partition 1 (20GB): XP and Programs
Partition 2 (30GB): Vista and Programs
Partition 3 (20GB): Music, photos and other files

[magical]

That's just asking for trouble unless you're frequently backing up your stuff elsewhere.

Wow ... never heard that partitioning your hard drive decreases drive MTBF ratings :) ...

I'm always impressed what I learn off these forums....

reality check, partitioning hard drives unless you plan on installing multiple operating systems is kinda useless these days ... even if you have a critical crash your more than likely going to want to re-install your software anyways .....

If you want a real solution get another hard drive and run a raid-1 setup ...

[chatbox]

Wow ... never heard that partitioning your hard drive decreases drive MTBF ratings :) ...

I'm always impressed what I learn off these forums....

reality check, partitioning hard drives unless you plan on installing multiple operating systems is kinda useless these days ... even if you have a critical crash your more than likely going to want to re-install your software anyways .....

If you want a real solution get another hard drive and run a raid-1 setup ...

Yup, agree with you there...

However, I think the "trouble" meant by the original poster is that these days we store hell of a lot more data on harddrives (we as humans, are more tied to computers) than ever before. It's a much bigger "trouble" than say 10 years ago if your drive crap out on you now....not saying having two or more drives can increase MTBF...

And if you're really loaded, a real solution would be site redundancy and real-time replication via a FC link.

[Gee]

Since it is one physical disk. If it fails, it won't matter how many partitions you have. There are several advantages to partitioning a drive.

Organization is obvious

But the main advantage is, data retention. if you have to reformat your computer and you keep your data on a seperate partition, then you will not have to back up onto disc before the format. Just format your c drive and reload all your programs while your data is stored on the d drive.

A less significant bonus with multiple partitions is cluster size. Smaller drives or partitions use smaller cluster sizes, thus give you more storage. Of course with files being as big as they are. The size increase is minimal.

[mok86]

I dont run partitions...

OS drive + progs : 36gb
Anime Drive: 300gb x 2 Raid 1
Temp dld Drive: 320gb
Tv Shows: 500gb x 2 Raid 1

[cmge]

[drive 1 - 74gb raptor]
20gb - WinXP
50gb - Programs

[drive 2 - 500gb SATA II]
250gb - Backup
250gb - Unsorted

[drive 3 - 500gb SATA II]
250gb - Movies
250gb - Torrents

[drive 4 - 120gb External]
120gb - mostly empty

[board123]

Wow ... never heard that partitioning your hard drive decreases drive MTBF ratings :) ...

I'm always impressed what I learn off these forums....

reality check, partitioning hard drives unless you plan on installing multiple operating systems is kinda useless these days ... even if you have a critical crash your more than likely going to want to re-install your software anyways .....
But the main advantage is, data retention. if you have to reformat your computer and you keep your data on a seperate partition, then you will not have to back up onto disc before the format. Just format your c drive and reload all your programs while your data is stored on the d drive.
It's not about MTBF at all.

[Gee]

It's not about MTBF at all.

I never said anything about MTBF.

I just simply stated that you can reformat your hard drive and not have to worry about backing up your data if you have it on a seperate partition.

[board123]

I agree with you. Sorry for the confusion.

[bionicbadger]

That's just asking for trouble unless you're frequently backing up your stuff elsewhere.

Not really, as pointed out, partitions don't save you from a disk failure. Honestly the only thing I have stored that NEEDs backing up is my resume which I keep in a few places anyway, and some family photos which are burned to DVD already. Everything else is replaceable pretty easily. I used to do separate partitions on other computers, but came to the realizaiton that it doesn't really help much.

[magical]

I never said anything about MTBF.

I just simply stated that you can reformat your hard drive and not have to worry about backing up your data if you have it on a seperate partition.

How many people do this on there own? not many ... and If they do they will usually 9 times out of 10 reinstall windows overtop of itself ... not usually fixing the problem ... They'll install XP with no service pack with the computer directly connected to the internet and by the time that its done the computer will already be worm infested from being on for 1 minute on the net ... Nowadays this doesn't happen quite so often due to the fact that most people have a xp sp-2 CD but this was very common place a few years ago! ...

Partitioning is pretty useless unless it is your only drive and you have no other way to move the data over to a external source or network drive.

I guess for people that dont know where there files are stored on the hard drive, having seperate drive letters is a benefit, but looking above some of these examples are pretty bad... 60GB for a windows XP install??.. must not have much installed, plus where does the virtual stuff go, did you set it to another drive...

I build computers, fix computers, etc for a living, and sure its more convienient when people partition the drives, but unless you redirect the my documents/etc and such you still have to go 'searchin' for stuff regardless of what drives they have .... and in the day of bloated software installs I wouldn't dream in having a primary partition less than 80GB ... and If the drive has a H/W failure it don't matter its gone anyways... and Backups can be done with directorys so having drives instead of C:\Games and C:\Music is not worth it ... in the olden days if the person really wanted a sudo-partition but wanted it to be dynamic in some sort of way you could just use the SUBST command and it would 'virtually' look like it has another drive .... something you could still do in XP and therefore dynamically you could have access to your whole drive without worrying how much you are using in each partition while still having different drive letters for each type of storage necessary ...

...

[sxz]

...

I don't know about you but besides a hardware crash (which is what I have external backups for), sometimes Windows can corrupt on its own (namely the registry hive) and you'll be required to either overwrite it with older/default files (where the problem may crop up again) or just do a clean reinstall. This happened to me a month or two ago and it was a pain to even find some folders/files (since it took my user profile with it). However since I had 90% of my files on my second partition it wasn't too hard to keep everything intact. The drive itself was fine as it didn't report any problems with its SMART readings and chkdsk revealed nothing either.

Also I don't see why a 60GB partition for system isn't enough. To be honest I can't imagine most people using enough applications to take up 60GB of space (unless you want to install multiple modern games, which I don't). I have about 3 of the games I play most often and that's about it. I have everything I need to use installed and still have a good 30GB free. If anything, people need to stop installing bloated apps that installs more useless junk they don't need. If you know exactly what you want to install and get the apps that do it with the least footprint then you really don't need that much space. Programs like Acrobat, Windows Media Player, BT clients, all sorts of other programs, you can easily replace with freeware or open source programs that do the same thing but use up a lot less space and resources (Foxit Reader, Media Player Classic, uTorrent, GIMP, Open Office etc.)

I don't doubt that you know a lot since you do this for a living but most of those people who come to you for help with this kind of stuff don't know what they're doing in the first place. Partitions for me are all about avoiding software/data corruption issues rather than physical issues.

[toalan]

I usually partition about 20-30 GB for windows, it does not matter how large the hard disk is, I only do a 20-30 GB windows partition.

A seperate partition for windows is great bacause I can quickly restore a ghost image located on another partition, having a small partition forces me to not install bloatware and reduces the backup size of my ghost image backups.

[magical]

I usually partition about 20-30 GB for windows, it does not matter how large the hard disk is, I only do a 20-30 GB windows partition.

A seperate partition for windows is great bacause I can quickly restore a ghost image located on another partition, having a small partition forces me to not install bloatware and reduces the backup size of my ghost image backups.

Yeah I dont bother with ghost because even tho you might get your system running exactly how you want it and you can have a quick restore, by the time I want to do the restore all the software is now pretty much out of date ... and generally my windows just becomes slow and problematic before It all out crashes ...

[Bunkhouse]

I used to have
Drive 1: 250GB
100GB XP
100GB Music
50GB files/acronis OS image ect..
Drive 2: 120GB Movies.

Now I have my 250GB XP and have everything else on a DNS-323 NAS box 2x500GB RAID1.

They'll install XP with no service pack with the computer directly connected to the internet and by the time that its done the computer will already be worm infested from being on for 1 minute on the net I completely agre with that. I go for the XP install --> SP2-->AUTOPATCHER and then officescan before connecting to the net. or just have a fresh install w/ SP2 acronis image so i'm just the latest version of autopatcher away from being up to date.