[Turokess]

Hi everyone,

I am planning on getting a new PC shortly and I really want to know if I should plan on partitioning the hard drive to help with Photoshop's and Windows' performance. I was looking over Loki's suggestions here http://www.guerillapixel.com/pages/digital_ill_pages/win_tuneup.htm and I was wondering what people think about this setup. Does anybody have any other partition setup they think works well. Or is it even worth the trouble trying to separate everything? I wanted to avoid shoving everything on one drive because I haven't had the best experience with that in the past. Since this is a new computer, I want everything to be right for once.
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[faB]

The essential I think is that you create at least one partition for Windows only like Loki says.

The reason is that incase of troubles you can completely wipe out the 1st partition and reinstall windows without loosing any data. I have found from experience that I ALWAYS forgot to back up stuff before I wiped my boot partition so now I have this setup

C: ~5 gb WinXP + all windows 'essentials' installs

Note.. right AFTER installing win XP, and your particular drivers, you should have about 1.5 to 2gb of space used. if you jave norton utilities you can use ghost then and with a little luck you COULD fit the compressed image on a 700mb CD. So dont install anything much and dont instal;l all the garbage that windows ships with..

D: all non-personal data , can be erased any time without loss i.e. Games, temporary downloads, mp3's ..

I have window's swap file on D: because I installed too much stuff on C:.. but I think it's better to have it on your 1st partition, so it will not be fragmented with all the data that you move on the main partition (D ..

ALSO.. defragmenting a large partition takes forever.. so dont do like me set the swap file on C: or on yet another partition like Loki suggests

E: ~1 GB this is my personal data partition, if I ever have to reformat the entire hard drive I know all the sensible data I want to bbackup is somewhere in here, I have a PORTFOLIO directory where I save all the work from PS/painter, web design, it's all in directories i.e.
faB-painter
faB-txts
faB-web/ homepage/

if I have to make a backup I look at anything with my name in it 'faB-' and burn it.. so I dont have to browse my hardrive for hours.. and I can erase everything after wards without worry

~faB
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[Matthew]

I have on my computer divided the drive into one c:\20gB and
two D:\20gB and I think that works fine.
How big is your drive?

[soogarrush]

perforance would not be dramatic but having swap in the first partition (better yet the front of a second drive) will be more efficient. Create a small partition for "temp files"(internet cache and such) will also be better, since those tend to be really fragmented...

also cluster sizes increase performace also, but it depends on what type of files will be stored on the drives

all the info you can read up on radified's guide
http://partition.radified.com/

[B0b]

my 40Gb Drive is in 5 Partitions:

4Gb (FAT) OS (Win 2K, XP isn't a viable option for professional use, too many bugs and too slow in comparison to 2K, also SCSI control Sux in XP)

10Gb (NTFS: compression enabled) for Work: this is backed up on CD's as clients everytime i do work

20Gb (NTFS: compression enabled) for Apps and other stuff

2Gb (FAT) for Photoshop Scratch: format this regularly

730Mb (FAT) for CD writing

i'm getting Dual WD 80GB 2MbCache soon and putting them in RAID 0 for performance, i can't stand waiting for 300Mb files to save.. (current fastest writing speed is 12Mb sec.. RAID 0 will allow near 60Mb sec) (RAID 0 comes with risks, so i'll b keeping the 30Gig as a back-up drive to put all mission critical info on, work etc at the end of the day..

[B0b]

[Turokess]

Thanks guys for giving me your suggestions. They'll be helpful when planning what partitions I'll have. I forgot to mention the hard drive is going to be a 120GB ATA. The OS is going to be Windows XP Pro. I don't have Win. 2K.
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[B0b]

120Gb hey, that WD, IBM or Maxtor??
u got an ATA 100 controller?

ATA33-66 won't see above 100Mb..

[Turokess]

It is an Ultra ATA-100 7200 RPM drive. I'm not building this computer from scratch, though. It's coming from Dell, so I don't know what brand of hard drive they use. Maybe Maxtor. Whenever I've bought a second hard drive I've gotten Maxtors.
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[Snakebyte]

I just got myself a 120 gig drive and partitioned it as follows.
C: 5Gig WinXp NTFS and pagefile
D: 20Gig ArtDrive NTFS all artwork and scratchdisk
E: 20Gig Games NTFS
F: 25Gig Music NTFS
G: ~46Gig NTFS Downloads/movies (DVD rips)

Maxtor DiamondMax 9 Ultra Series

I like to keep the more important data closer the beginning of the drive for performance, however, with a multi platter dirve this isnt much a problem untill the 80gig mark with the Diamond max line, 60gig with other dirves, after that point data is written to the second disk starting back at the beggining (outer edge).....

for comparison my drive (C: drive) averages ~48.9MB per second and 39MBps on the innertracks..... blah
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[Turokess]

So is NTFS the better choice to make over FAT even for smaller partitions? I don't really know much about these two options. I thought FAT was to be used for anything under 32GB.
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[Snakebyte]

It depends, Fat is a little faster but is not secure nor does it support LARGE files/partitions. NTFS is a better option if you only run Win2k or XP. Also, you cant see NTFS in Dos (from a bood disk) which can be a pain if you use Norton Ghost or any other Dos apps. In the end it depends on what you do.
Both are good file systems but in my opinion NTFS is better.
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[B0b]

NTFS makes better use of your Diskspace, tho it takes a chunk out of your Partition for TOC, this is why NTFS is faster for disk access to files.. (you can also assign permissions on an NTFS partition so if you have different users on the machine you can block them from seeing drives you don't want them to have access to )

[B0b]

[SWMatt]

Personally, I set up as follows

HDD 1 Windows Drive 40GB
Win Scratch Disk

HDD 2 Data 40GB

HDD 3 160GB RAID 0 array (for fast R/W)
Used for:
Windows personal files and temp directories (in case progs crash
and leave useful files (or i forget to change directory b4 saving!)

Photoshop Scratch Disk

I'm looking to add another RAID Volume for win scratch (but thats prob going too far!)
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Hmm, signature... right!

[Turokess]

My, I posted this a long time ago. I finally got a new computer since then and have it set up this way:

2 128GB Seagate Barracuda harddrives set up into a 256GB Raid-0.

Broken up like this:
C: 10GB Windows
D: 5GB Scratch
E: 20GB Programs
F: 20GB Image Files
G: 40GB Music
H: 40GB Empty
I: 53GB Empty

Maybe it doesn't need to be broken up so much but it's easier to maintain it that way for me. Anyway, I'm happy and it works for me.
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[Drunken Monkey]

5gb for C is too small IMO. Go 7.5-10.
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[B0b]

my new RAID 0 Drives are set as:

8GB OS
10GB Scratch
12GB Apps
4GB Web space (clients my site)
10GB Completed Movies
100GB RAW Digital Cam Corder footage
8.6GB Work
4GB CD writing area