Re: Advice Please Re: Hard Drive Speeds Relative to Partition Size

On Tue, 03 Feb 2009 22:00:19 +0000, Jaimie Vandenbergh
<jaimie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, 3 Feb 2009 20:00:21 -0000, "Tippunmon"
<tippunmon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

At
the moment and solely in my own opinion I am playing with fire as the OS,
Programs AND the data are in effect one one drive only (plus the separate
backup). This is getting on my nerves as it goes against my philosophy of
keeping the OS etc away from the data.

This is nowhere near as important as it used to be.

Back before XPsp2 or so (or 2ksp4, for that stream) it was pretty
common for Windows to mash its C: drive on an irregular basis. This
led to the general consensus being to make sure your stuff was safe,
by putting it somewhere else. These days Windows is nowhere near so
poorly behaved

The other uesful function a D: for Data drive had is to allow you to
reinstall the C: drive without affecting your own stuff, often to
combat Windows habit of building up cruft. But these days the
equipment to backup your stuff is so cheap and available (external
hard drives, NAS, old machine with a fileshare, whatever), and the
extra utility and safeness of having your backup on a physically
different device so obvious, that you can just vape the C: drive and
then copy your stuff back after.

Belt and braces, I have several partitions for different datas which
makes the backup process that much easier as well as allowing easy
format and reinstall for the OS and programs.

Plus stuff is so much faster now that allowing for the slight extra
slowdown from fragmentation is easier.

Yeah the only partitions I regularly format contain rapidly changing
data, the others don't improve so much that the time spent is
worthwhile.

One BIG factor as I'm currently finding is the varying speed of
transfer from one disk to another, for some reason transferring a
bunch of big files off an E-SATA disk onto a SATA disk is taking
several orders of magnitude longer than transferring some stuff from a
USB drive onto the E-SATA one.
.

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