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

Hi

As odd as it may seem, there is a "right" answer for this. There are many
variations of "right", but basically:

a) OS onto one partition (eg windows C:\ , Linux / /var /usr etc)

b) User data onto a different partition

a may be further subdivided (OS/applications/swap) and b may be subdivided
(personal user data aka home directory versus "shared" data like films,
mp3s, photos which the whole family access).


Do not ever install the OS onto a whole-disk-sized partition and then lose
your data in amongst the crap. If you do and have to re-install the OS, you
will weep.

Due to the fairly sucky way that DOS partitioning works, I would also make
all partitions "primary partitions" upto the limit of 4, unless you know
that the installer is using the newer MS partitioning scheme.

Something else to consider - leave a second partition spare so you can
install a second OS. It won;t amount to much out of 1/2 TB.

Cheers

Tim