Lemon Jelly said:
I don't have any issues regarding your advice concerning PF placement
which is largely mirrored in the already quoted Alex N article but I do
have with the quoted para. One analogy that sticks in my mind is likening
a hard disc to a house. You can have everything in one big room which a
file system such as NTFS will allow without the pitfalls that FAT32 can
have. Different users can have their own cupboards to store their own
stuff etc. Now say you want to re-decorate or replace the carpet - you
have to shuffle everything around. Now divide that single living space up
into rooms according to purpose. The occupants now have the option to
share certain rooms & have their own private space.
Keeping one's data on the OS partition is if not actually dangerous, not a
brilliant idea. You OS starts acting up which requires reinstalling. You
have to then move all your (& possibly others) data to another location
before reformatting. OK, this is an extreme case where reformatting is
required but at the very least of having one extra partition for personal
data has to make sense.
I've moved virtually everything except the hibernate file off the OS
partition to others on the same physical disc or a 2nd one. If I mess up
the OS or want completely uninstall a certain application, I simply
overwrite my C drive with a previous image (stored on a different
partition of course) & after 20 mins, I'm back up & running without my own
data or settings being touched. There are also performance gains in using
multiple volumes such as reducing fragmentation. I even installed most
apps to another partition but usually restore both together to stop stuff
getting out of sync. Old school?
your points are well-made, paul, for the most part, i agree, and that is how
i might setup a single drive system as well, depending on the size, speed,
etc of the hard drive in question. in my previous article, regarding the
multi-HDD system, i had made the assumption that the user's data would be
stored on a different physical drive, not on the same one as the OS was
installed on. in the case of a multi-HDD system, it would be better to
store valuable user data on a separate physical drive (not the same one as
the OS is installed on), which precludes the need for creating separate
partitions on each drive. but then there is the issue of moving user data
from the Windows' default locations to a different drive, Windows embeds and
buries user data all over the system drive, and although not a problem for
geeks like us, moving it all to a new location is usually beyond the scope
of the average user. when i said, 'old school' i was referring to the old
days when it was necessary to chop-up the drive into tiny partitions since
earlier versions of windows couldn't access partitions larger than, what was
it, 4GB or something like that. there are some people who still have that
mindset, and chop-up their drives into small partitions, as a way of
organizing their data. to my way of thinking, that is old-school... that's
what directories are for. organizing your programs onto a different
partition is also a good idea, but only if you can restore the registry
dependencies in the event of a crash/restore on the system drive, not to
mention all the shared .dll library files that 3rd party software installs
into the \windows\system32\ and \Program Files\Common Files\ directories.
it is possible to change the location of the \Program Files\Common Files\
directory, through the %CommonProgramFiles% environment variable, but again,
beyond the scope of most users, and that doesn't address the problem of
missing (program) files from the \system32\ directory should the operating
system require reinstallation.
anyway, as you say, data is better stored in a separate partition from the
operating system, or better still, stored on a separate physical (data)
drive.
, and Windows is on C:, the pagefile can be moved from C: to either