Vortex wrote:
Well the time has come.....as it does every few years.

My HDD is virtually full. I have insufficient memory. My PC is too noisy.
My son tells me my graphics card is inadequate. No more room for
enhancements and upgrades. It's time for a new one.

I've just ordered one of these http://tinyurl.com/kjp8p with (amongst other
things) a 500G HDD which I envisage assembling this weekend.

The most important decision I have to make in the coming days is whether to
format the 500G as one huge partition or to have multiple partitions eg:
100G for OS and applications and 400G for My Documents/Pictures/Videos etc.

What would you do?


David

I doubt it matters much which you choose. In the event of a corrupted
file system or failing hard drive partitioning should make data recovery
easier, but whether it improves system performance is a matter of some
debate. On the one hand having two file systems creates extra work for
your CPU and disk, but it should reduce fragmentation of your operating
system files. I'm under the impression, however, that on a PC running
Windows it's pretty hard to move your user profiles (stuff like your
Internet Explorer cache files and favourites, which are modified very
frequently) onto a separate partition. Fragmentation should only become
a problem when you're running out of space on the hard drive, and with a
500 GB disk that should take a while. I'm also under the impression that
newer versions of Windows, using NTFS as opposed to FAT, are less
susceptible to fragmentation, but it's been some time since I used
Windows seriously myself. If you do decide to partition, put some
serious thought into the size of the partitions - it's easy to get it wrong!

Best wishes,

Chris