Hard Disk Care

Hello WebFurumz Community,

Recently, I saw one article about how to take care of your pc harddisk. How to manage them.
They are saying that YOU SHOULD CREATE A PARTITION:

• Assign 10GB should be assigned for the OPERATING SYSTEM.
• Assign 40GB-50GB should be assigned for the APPLICATIONS [eg. Office, Photoshop Suite, Games, etc]
• Assign 3GB-5GB should be assigned for the GARBAGE (Swap File).
• Assign 10GB should be assigned for PERSONAL DATA.

Every new program that you instal (eg. games, ms office program) will be stored NOT in C:/ but in your APPLICATION Partition that you have created. [with a little registry modification, you can do this]

All your Temporary files will be in GARBAGE Partition so you no longer need a cleaning tools, You just can format this partition.
[with a little registry modification, you can do this as well...]

Ok.. here comes my questions!

Is This A Good Practise? Is There Any Consequences? What are the PRO? What are the CONTRA?

Thanks in advance.

I'm not saying that this is a bad practice, but that really aren't any pros or cons. You won't get a faster read time because you still only have one drive. And if the drive breaks, all the partitions (and all your data) are gone anyway.

The only plus is the GARBAGE thing - that you can just format one partition to get rid of your "garbage" but I'm not so sure it that is really worth it. And, it might help some people stay a bit more organized, if you're like that....

You would be surprised how easy it is to turn an older hard drive into an external after the old computer is put out of its misery. My old,new externals each has a job...web site, programs, consulting and back up of same. When I need something I just plug in, us and save. That way my main computer (a laptop) purrs like a kitten. Who needs partitions? That is so DOS. lol

I used to partition all the time, to seprate my programs from my files, but I always ended up filling up the one partition and having to move stuff around to fit all my files on, basically destroying the reason of why I partitioned it in the first place.

If you want to keep stuff seperate, I recommend you just use folders, or an external hard drive if you need to move stuff around, but I can't see any good reason, apart from if you wanted to install another OS on the same hard drive, to partition.

Well, nice explaination.
I am talking about big Hard Disk here (160GB, 200GB).
If you dont have any Partition, you will have trouble during formation your HDD. You have to backup all your data to some other place before you can peform the formating. This could take hours!

Ok let say I format my SYSTEM partition, and leave my APPLICATION alone. After re-install windows to the SYSTEM partition, do you guys think that all the application inside the APPLICATION partition still be working?

Or we need to re-install all the application as well?
If so, what is the point of creating the APPLICATION partition?

Just did a quick google search, since I had an idea about it, but wasn't sure (source)
So looks like a no for most programs.

So that's mean the APPLICATION partition is just useless! No point of creating them.

Or maybe, in term of fast access (SYSTEM partition)?
Well, thanks @lun.

Partitions don't improve access time. It's still one drive.

In my opinion the only good use of a partition is for dual operating systems,eg linux one partition windows on another.

If you want faster access time, get a fast hard drive. Simple.

I use an large internal and two external but only for separation. Internal for apps ans sytem, one external for all my web stuff, another external for media (music, video, pics).

Makes no difference to performance (may even be slower?) but is better for organisation which I think is the only real benefit of partitioning.

Pete.

Ahhh....
I get the idea.
I have 2 partition in my pc. 1 for OS and the other one for my mp3/file/digital picture (which I created a backup copy in my external hdd as well.)

Anyway, thankx for the explaination guys.

I agree with Pa007 I use an external drive for my music and other media files. My internal hard drive is strictly for my applications and my os.

Yes. I have 2 HDD in my pc. A 80 and a 300

On the 80 is vista and all the program that can only run on C:/

The 300 is partitioned in to a 200 and a 80. The 200 is for programs and the 80 is for files .

Works a treat. Also when the pc goes down its easy to restore

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No most of them will work if you reinstall and don't change you hardware.

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Hemm, on the second tought, maybe I should/will use externals hard disk for my file collection as most of you suggested.

Thanks for all the idea guys..

I had a 250gb hard drive,
partitioned a few times.
C was for programs and system.
D was for media and downloads. and
E was My server files

Guess what?

the hard drive broke and i lost everything.
And I thought SATA drives were supposed to be safer?
I've never broken any other hard drive

A program that I've started hearing about recently when listening to Security Now podcasts with Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson (http://www.twit.tv/SN) is spinrite. It has glowing testimonials, fixes drives that fail and become unbootable and where other programs say that they cannot recover the drives, can recover data (so they say) from bad sectors by repeated reading and statistical analysis, and using SMART to report that a drive it going to fail even before things start going wrong. Using spinrite is suggested as good practice for good health of drive and data.

The testimonial that I heard the other day was from someone in a company who had a machine that stopped booting and I think said that no OS was found on the drive. Really in a bad way. They used spinrite and after a couple of hours, the drive was back and the machine was booting.

http://spinrite.info

And from a review at http://www.kickstartnews.com/reviews...inrite_v6.html

Never tried it, although I have a drive sitting here that started clicking and finally failed to work some months ago and am curious to see how well it would work on that.

I have my 100gb external hdd used to be my laptop hard-disk.
Whenever I copy/transfer file between my laptop to the external harddisk, if keeps on "hanging".

I did the hitachi drive test on the external hdd and found lots of problem in the external hard disk, but still can be use for file storage. Maybe I should try SpinRite?

It mean the hard drive is one the way out. Going to stop soon.

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Agreed. You don't say what the problems are, but if the system keeps hanging then that's going to be annoying and inconvenient at best, and there's no upside I can see to keeping the drive. It might not be a drive fault, but whatever the cause you seem to have a problem.

If the data that you need is still there and intact then I'd recommend getting a new drive if you need the space, copying data off, and throwing away the 100GB drive. Spinrite definitely sounds a great tool to try if you're in trouble, but if you've still got the data and have warnings of problems then you can take easy preventative action now.