How large for partition?

[DeViLgunner]

I want to partition my 40 gig drive. I would like to have only Windows on 1 partition, so how large should this one be. I am installing Win XP PRo on it btw.

Also is there any way to save my Music lists from Windows Media Player?

 

[Arrow]

I would personally do 10GB, 10GB, 20GB.

Rob
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[Clarentavious]

Well I am a harddrive performance freak, so I would just forget the space saving and dedicated windows partition idea, and get the best performance. I would make one 33GB partition (that way you will have 32KB clusters), and make an extended partition out of the rest of the drive, and just not use that extra 7GB for anything but backup (since your performance will be lowest there, since it will be around the outter area of the platter, you seek time will also be the highest there).

 

[DeViLgunner]

Clarentavious how large of a performance diffrence would that partition make over a standard partition?

 

[Clarentavious]

Well the higher your cluster size, the better your performance will be (but you will get more space wasted).

Any one single file takes up a cluster (no matter how small the file is). Say let's say you have a 2KB text document. That document will file one cluster, and since the cluster is 32KB, you're going to lose 30KB of space.

Your file allocation tables (or FAT) are composed of clusters. Clusters are composed of sectors (the smallest area of data on a drive, 512 bytes). The bigger they are, the better the performance.

I have a 20GB 7200 IBM drive. My primary DOS partition is 16.1GB My extended which makes up the rest of my drive is 3.1GB

My burst rate on the primary is about 40MB per second. On the extended, it is about 25MB.

There's no TOO much of a difference in the normal transfer rate though.


-----

Benchmarks don't lie

 

[paulmartin]

i didn't understand the last sentence.
whatsoever i think the best compromise is to choose a 16KB cluster size. on my 40GB hard disk i have around 110 or 120 thousands files. the average size is around 100K/file. the number of files behind 32K is around 60 thousands files.
thus i can deduce than more than 50 percents are under 32K. this involves a maximum wasted space of (32-4)*(60.000) ie 1.6GB. this is not a high value, just 4 percents of the hard disk size. besides the cluster size is 4 times the standard one so the OS has to manage 4 times less. this involves obviously a gain of performance but i don't know exactly the percentage.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by paulmartin on 06/11/02 05:21 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[sen2000]

I have used 5 GB for system, 1 GB swap, and the rest on a datadrev(programs, games and so on).

 

[DeViLgunner]

So 5gig for WinXP would be best?

 

[Guest]

4 or 5 Gb .

I use a 4.5Gb for w2k-pro, that leaves over 1.5gb spare as some programs I use like to be on the same partition. I need at least 15% spare and IMHO 25% spare is better otherwise defrag does not like it etc. I will reduce its size once I am totally happy with the o/s, using Powerquests partition magic 7.

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