Is there a benefit to partioning a drive to match it's platter sizes?

[gozad]

I bought a WD 640 Black, and have read that it is made of two 320 platters. I want to partition it, and one partition will be my OS drive, but was wondering if there is any benefit to partitioning it into two 320 drives to match the platters, vs partitioning it into 3 or 4 drives and having a slightly smaller drive C for the OS.

 

[arges86]

Wont make much of a difference.
If you have 3 partitions, that means that the drive has to seek a 3rd less than if it had 1. So partition it up if u want to. I always do, for organizational reasons

 

[MRFS]

Take a careful look at these graphs:

http://www.supremelaw.org/systems/io.tests/platter.transfer.crossover.graphs.2.png


All modern HDDs strive to achieve the same or similar recording density
from outermost to innermost tracks.

This means that the amount of data on any given track
is directly proportional to its circumference, computed
as Pi x Diameter.

Thus, track geometry plays a very important role
in the speed of any given track or cylinder:
a "cylinder" is the set of tracks that have the
exact same diameter.

To minimize access times for all OS programs and files,
it's best to minimize the OS partition e.g. to 30-50 GB,
and to format the remainder as a dedicated data partition.

This not only accelerates all OS I/O; it reduces wear
on the read/write armature bearing and servo mechanism.

This data management scheme also makes it much easier
to create and manage drive images of the OS partition.

Ideally, a drive image is first written to a second HDD,
then copied back to the data partition on the primary HDD.

Then, if the OS partition suffers a malware infection,
it's very easy to return to a stable OS by restoring
the latest good drive image.

Also, the first partition on the secondary HDD should be
formatted to be equal in size to the OS partition on the
primary HDD.

In this manner, if one or the other of 2 HDDs should fail,
a good drive image will be found on the one HDD
that has not failed, and the OS can be easily restored
using that good drive image.

The major downside of this scheme, of course, is that private data files
need to be moved to the dedicated data partition; otherwise,
all private data files created AFTER the latest drive image will disappear,
if that drive image file must be restored.


MRFS