How big is your primary OS partition?

[Jon Lai]

Let's make a poll and have some fun again =)

[Dave98]

It would depend on what OS you use. Obviously, Vista partitions are going to be a lot bigger than XP partitions.

I'm still on XP and I use a 20GB partition

[Snicla]

No partition, but that's because I was installing XP at 3am drunk and a full format was taking forever.

[CodecX81]

30960 for XP
150 for Vista - 25gb free :(

[olympic]

I keep my OS(Vista x64) and apps on a pair of 74GB Raptors in RAID 0, so 138GB for me according to Windows. 90GB free.

[Emancipated]

What do I win?

http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/2105/picture1qp1.png

[Oversized Rooster]

I think partitions are the poor man's way.

I simply dedicate one of my 4 HDs to the system. I'm using a 300GB WD VelociRaptor for my system "partition."

[CodecX81]

I think partitions are the poor man's way.

I simply dedicate one of my 4 HDs to the system. I'm using a 300GB WD VelociRaptor for my system "partition."

But don't you like to penn in that OS?

I've always figured keeping a small partition at the beginning of the drive doesn't allow data to jump all over the platter..thus keeping latency times down.

[Jucius Maximus]

19.0 GB

Yes, I partitioned it as 19456 MB.

[Soulsaber]

40GB for win 7! (on my laptop....runs way better than vista)

[board123]

120 GB for Vista x64.

9 GB page file on a separate physical drive instead of on the OS partition.

[rabbit]

> But don't you like to penn in that OS?

I've always figured keeping a small partition at the beginning of the drive doesn't allow data to jump all over the platter..thus keeping latency times down.


I prefer a partition only for OS and programs to manage back-ups and restoring. I don't need 250GB for all that (currently using <10GB of a 30GB partition), so why would I want to waste the rest of the drive on nothing?

Saying that partitions is a poor man's way is just ignorant. (I have four HDDs installed internally, btw.)

[killoverme]

I think partitions are the poor man's way.

I simply dedicate one of my 4 HDs to the system. I'm using a 300GB WD VelociRaptor for my system "partition."

i got 4 (320GB) HDD but i raided them (2 in 0 and 2 in 1)

the raid-0 i partitioned 40gb for my windows xp + applications and the rest for storage

I used the parition because it uses my space more effectively. now i have a HDD of 40, 560gb and 300gb =)

560 or random files, 40 for os and 300 (which is raid-1) for important ones.

[Jon Lai]

I think partitions are the poor man's way.

I simply dedicate one of my 4 HDs to the system. I'm using a 300GB WD VelociRaptor for my system "partition."

It's inefficient if you want to save images of your OS+program though. With partitions I can just ghost the partition and if something screws up I can simply reimage the partition from a stable state.

[phrozenphury]

Using raid0 raptors here on Vista64

[willy]

I agree with CodecX81 and rabbit ... I usually allocate 40GB to my OS+apps partition. And I take snapshot of that partition to another HD for quick image backup.

[ASharp]

No partitions here, just one 640GB drive for my OS and all the programs. I have a couple of other drives used for storage.

[Matrixvibe]

Using a gateway media center pc, 320gb hdd and it came with a small like 3gb partition for backup or something. The computers i've built myself i used to partition the hard drives in half, so that if i needed to format i could just move all my files to the other partition, but now that my computers have multiple drives i no longer partition, instead i just use a smaller drive as the primary.

[zod]

I have a 320gb hard drive with just the one primary partition on it for the OS drive. Which is a waste because its only has the OS and my apps and games on it. So theres alot of free space.

It just that I've upgrade other drives, and its the the smallest one I have left.. lol.

[Zero1]

2 x 160GB Drives in Raid 1 for everything except movie storage and such.

I usually download and install programs, run VM's etc.. Backup and move files when needed to bigger drives.

[mingyang]

100

[Captain Soviet]

A 500 gig drive for vista x64, and 4 more 500 gig drives in RAID 5 (so 1.5 TB) for general storage.

[Soulsaber]

120 GB for Vista x64.

9 GB page file on a separate physical drive instead of on the OS partition.

How did you split up the page file from your os partition? Is there a noticeable increase in speed?

[SinCron]

I voted 80+ because my new build will have at least an 80GB HD dedicated to the OS and apps. I hate using partitions >.<. After that, 500GB HD for games, 500-750 for movies/music.

[McLaren__F1]

150GB WD Raptor X as my Primary OS partition

[Jon Lai]

Amazing how many of you dedicate a whole hard drive to OS/apps... no wonder you guys keep saying you run out of capacity - precisely because you're not using them efficiently to start with ;)

[torseller07]

How did you split up the page file from your os partition? Is there a noticeable increase in speed?
On Vista, go to Control Panel > System and Maintenance > System > Advanced system settings > Performance > Advanced > Virtual memory.

Currently I have my page files spread across two physical hard drives (one of them is a WD Raptor). One page file is on the OS partition and the other one is on a dedicated disk. Overall the system has become more responsive, so it's worth an upgrade if you can get a small and fast hard drive for cheap.

[Jucius Maximus]

Amazing how many of you dedicate a whole hard drive to OS/apps... no wonder you guys keep saying you run out of capacity - precisely because you're not using them efficiently to start with ;)

Efficiency is one thing, but partitions have other benefits. My brother and I set up all family PCs to have a separate OS partition, and then we put all Apps and working data on other partitions.

This has saved us a number of times when user error, a virus, or some other problem messed up the OS and and we had to reformat and re-install. Since the OS is segregated, we only had to reformat that one partition and everything else remained just as it was before.

Maybe not efficient in terms of space, but then HDDs are cheap. Time is the real cost these days.

[Snufflufikist]

20GB for XP gives me more than enough room for apps, even if I decide to install a few monster multi-gig games someday (unlikely). Really 10GB is enough.

Partitions are wonderful creatures. OS partition dies, it's easy to simply re-install. In fact, I was even bailed out once by having a 2nd XP install on a 3rd partition. I didn't mean to have 2 XP installs, it was to help transition to the new format w/o the downtime, but I ended up abandoning the new install. Anyways, one day I got a virus that shut down the computer within 60 seconds of boot. Instead of requiring a 2nd computer or a live cd with virus-scanner (requiring a 2nd computer), I just booted into the fresh OS, virus scanned the other partition, and rebooted. fixed in 10 minutes...

[Jon Lai]

Efficiency is one thing, but partitions have other benefits. My brother and I set up all family PCs to have a separate OS partition, and then we put all Apps and working data on other partitions.

This has saved us a number of times when user error, a virus, or some other problem messed up the OS and and we had to reformat and re-install. Since the OS is segregated, we only had to reformat that one partition and everything else remained just as it was before.

Maybe not efficient in terms of space, but then HDDs are cheap. Time is the real cost these days.

Yes.. like I said, I can make an image of the OS partition and simply reimage if someone goes wrong.

Putting apps in different partition than OS? But don't you have to reinstall the apps anyways (since during installation process the apps amend the registry in order to run properly)

[sleepyguy]

mine is pretty simple

160GB Vista64 OS C:
RAID1 250GB D:
RAID1 250GB D:

All important stuff resides in the mirror.

[originalnutta]

74 WD Raptor.

then about 1.5TBs on my d: and e:.


got over 3 TBs in external hdds.

[Jucius Maximus]

Putting apps in different partition than OS? But don't you have to reinstall the apps anyways (since during installation process the apps amend the registry in order to run properly)
True, but you still get a listing of all the apps because the files are still there on the other partition. So you are never wondering if you forgot to reinstall something.

[CodecX81]

True, but you still get a listing of all the apps because the files are still there on the other partition. So you are never wondering if you forgot to reinstall something.

Well, another good point is.. you could do a backup of the Windows system state...

If your PC ever crashed, reformat, install windows, update it and run a restore.. You will get all the registry items back, negating the need to reinstall all of those programs on the separate partition.

[Negotiator]

Lemme see...

640gb+500gb+500gb

640gb:
50gb-winxp+all apps - primary OS
30gb+4gb - Ubuntu
-used to have 50gb for Leopard but I never used it and it was kind of glitchy, so I got rid of it.-
-the rest of the space is primarily for things that are being used most often and backup

500gb drives are used for storage, both divided into 2 smaller partitions to better sort my stuff out. Although as I'm on a verge of getting another 640gb-1tb drive for external backup, I'll probably just delete those partitions and use each drive as a separate partition.

[torseller07]

I can't believe some people are saying partition is a bad / obsolete thing. It's not. Partition allows you to logically organize your drive, instead of one big monolithic mess. This would make your backup and optimization easier. e.g. your TEMP partition could be more fine tuned for fine grain size files while your MOVIES partition could be tuned for coarse grain size files (e.g. your PRON and HD movies from TPB). You can also choose which partition to defrag as well, instead of defrag the whole 1-2TB drive at once. e.g. heavily used partition can be made smaller, so defrag can be done more frequently and timely. There are other more obvious benefit, such as OS dual booting (for people who care).