How to slice a 2TB drive?

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Metspitzer

I am reading this:
http://partition.radified.com/
Here is the world according to me. Let me know if I am very far off
on this.

All I want to do is break the disk into 6 or so equal parts. The main
reason is to give each part its own drive letter and disk label. This
makes the FAT 6 times smaller so it only has to read 1/6 of the info
during access times. I also think this makes defragging easier, but
since XP doesn't always let me defrag without booting, I don't defrag
much.....well never.

XP allows 3 primary partitions and one extended (that can be sliced
many times) The only reason for a primary partition is to boot from.
I am not booting from this drive at all, but I don't see any reason
not to have 3 primary partitions, so my plain is...2,000G/6 is about
350.

I am going to have 3-350 primary and whatever is left will be the
extended partition. Because I have never dealt with logical drives, I
assume after I split the disk into 4 parts, I will have the option of
splitting the extended partition again into 3-300G parts.

Does this sound like it will fly?
 
Metspitzer said:
I am reading this:
http://partition.radified.com/
Here is the world according to me. Let me know if I am very far off
on this.

All I want to do is break the disk into 6 or so equal parts. The main
reason is to give each part its own drive letter and disk label. This
makes the FAT 6 times smaller so it only has to read 1/6 of the info
during access times. I also think this makes defragging easier, but
since XP doesn't always let me defrag without booting, I don't defrag
much.....well never.

XP allows 3 primary partitions and one extended (that can be sliced
many times) The only reason for a primary partition is to boot from.
I am not booting from this drive at all, but I don't see any reason
not to have 3 primary partitions, so my plain is...2,000G/6 is about
350.

I am going to have 3-350 primary and whatever is left will be the
extended partition. Because I have never dealt with logical drives, I
assume after I split the disk into 4 parts, I will have the option of
splitting the extended partition again into 3-300G parts.

Does this sound like it will fly?
Click to expand...

I have another suggestion. Ad-hoc partitioning.

Start with a primary partition. Make it big enough for a reasonable
time span of usage.

Leave the rest of the space unpartitioned and unused.

Now, when you do backups, defragging or other forms of maintenance,
you won't be waiting hours for 2TB of empty sectors to be processed,
examined or copied.

If you actually had 2TB of data available from other sources, then
you would be able to prepare a plan based on some sort of filing
system. (X space for photos, Y space for movies, Z space for documents,
and so on.)

For example, say I had 1TB of movies stored on a ton of small drives.
I'd set up a 1TB NTFS partition, then copy over the movies. That
partition will never need to be defragmented, as all the files are
big ones. You'll want to run chkdsk on it occasionally, to remove dormant
faults before they become an issue. But otherwise, there might not be much
to do there, except to make the occasional backup.

Keep your C: partition relatively small. If you make it a big partition
(such as your 350GB plan), then before you know it, it'll be filled
with 500000 small "cruft" files, and be painful and slow to maintain
or to search (if you're not using a good third party search tool).

So rather than being fixated on "slicing up an apple pie", put
some thought into the real usage. And if no plan comes to mind,
leave the unused parts blank. A plan will come together, sooner
than you think.

You can use primaries for the first three, because premature usage
of an extended, will only mean backing up and laying it out again
later. You can never get the split between an extended, and the
rest of the partitions, right.

As an example of this, I have somewhere around a 320GB disk in
my new laptop. I shrank the C: partition on it, down to 30GB
(with a plan perhaps, in the near future, to move up to 40GB, so
I can safely install SP1). The rest of the disk is currently
empty, and there are no other partitions than the wasteful partition
scheme the manufacturer of the laptop put there.

HTH,
Paul
 
I am reading this:
http://partition.radified.com/
Here is the world according to me. Let me know if I am very far off
on this.

All I want to do is break the disk into 6 or so equal parts. The main
reason is to give each part its own drive letter and disk label. This
makes the FAT 6 times smaller so it only has to read 1/6 of the info
during access times. I also think this makes defragging easier, but
since XP doesn't always let me defrag without booting, I don't defrag
much.....well never.

XP allows 3 primary partitions and one extended (that can be sliced
many times) The only reason for a primary partition is to boot from.
I am not booting from this drive at all, but I don't see any reason
not to have 3 primary partitions, so my plain is...2,000G/6 is about
350.

I am going to have 3-350 primary and whatever is left will be the
extended partition. Because I have never dealt with logical drives, I
assume after I split the disk into 4 parts, I will have the option of
splitting the extended partition again into 3-300G parts.

Does this sound like it will fly?
Click to expand...

If you're not going to be booting from this disk, then why bother with
primary partitions at all? Just make them all part of a single extended
partition.

Yousuf Khan
 
I am going to have 3-350 primary and whatever is left will be the
extended partition. Because I have never dealt with logical drives, I
assume after I split the disk into 4 parts, I will have the option of
splitting the extended partition again into 3-300G parts.
Click to expand...

I would create 3 primary & 1 extended. The extended partition can be
further sliced into more than 4 volumes.

--
@~@ Might, Courage, Vision, SINCERITY.
/ v \ Simplicity is Beauty! May the Force and Farce be with you!
/( _ )\ (x86_64 Ubuntu 9.10) Linux 2.6.37.3
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I am reading this:
http://partition.radified.com/
Here is the world according to me. Let me know if I am very far off
on this.
Click to expand...
After listening to the suggestions, can you do this with XP?
Say I create an extended partition (no primary) that is 1/4 space on
the drive and leave 3/4 unformatted (unallocated?), and make that 4
logical drives. Say I have a very good reason for having 4 different
type files. All I expect to happen is that when I run out of space is
that I just want all 4 drives to double in space.

What happens when I want to use another 1/4 of the space and I don't
really want 8 logical drives? I want 4 drives twice as large.

This make sense to anyone?
 
I would create 3 primary & 1 extended. The extended partition can be
further sliced into more than 4 volumes.
Click to expand...

That was my original plan. I am now considering only using part of
the drive.

Thanks
 
In message <[email protected]> someone claiming
to be Metspitzer said:
I am reading this:
http://partition.radified.com/
Here is the world according to me. Let me know if I am very far off
on this.

All I want to do is break the disk into 6 or so equal parts. The main
reason is to give each part its own drive letter and disk label. This
makes the FAT 6 times smaller so it only has to read 1/6 of the info
during access times.
Click to expand...

This isn't a factor for NTFS, NTFS' directory structures are distributed
around the disk and do not require a full scan.
I also think this makes defragging easier, but
since XP doesn't always let me defrag without booting, I don't defrag
much.....well never.
Click to expand...

Defragmenting tends to be more efficient on partitions with higher
percentages of free space (or at least it gets extremely inefficient
with reduces amount of space), so if you end up with three partitions
that are 90% full followed by one that is empty, you'll take
significantly longer to defragment than a single partition.

Moreover, fragmentation gets worse faster when the drive is full, so
you'll potentially hurt performance before you even count defragmenting
time.

(Personally I don't care how long a defragmentation takes, within
reason, it's the sort of thing the computer does when I'm not around and
therefore don't care)
XP allows 3 primary partitions and one extended (that can be sliced
many times)
Click to expand...

That's a BIOS limit going way back to the 80s.
The only reason for a primary partition is to boot from.
I am not booting from this drive at all, but I don't see any reason
not to have 3 primary partitions, so my plain is...2,000G/6 is about
350.
Click to expand...

A better question is why?
I am going to have 3-350 primary and whatever is left will be the
extended partition. Because I have never dealt with logical drives, I
assume after I split the disk into 4 parts, I will have the option of
splitting the extended partition again into 3-300G parts.

Does this sound like it will fly?
Click to expand...

You can have as many logical partitions within the one extended
partition as you want, so the total number is moot.

Strictly speaking you can only boot from a primary partition, but beyond
that, there's little need to care about the difference between primary
and logical partitions these days.

There's really very little need to worry about partitioning at all in
most cases, even with 2TB volume sizes, unless you have multiple
operating systems, have a need for different types of filesystems, or
have organizational reasons that might cause you to want to wipe one
partition entirely.

The days of having to partition as a matter of course are basically an
element of the past, at least in the Windows world.
 
I would create 3 primary& 1 extended. The extended partition can be
That was my original plan. I am now considering only using part of
the drive.
Click to expand...

You are the boss. Do it your way! :)

--
@~@ Might, Courage, Vision, SINCERITY.
/ v \ Simplicity is Beauty! May the Force and Farce be with you!
/( _ )\ (x86_64 Ubuntu 9.10) Linux 2.6.37.3
^ ^ 16:49:01 up 1 day 3:10 0 users load average: 1.09 1.09 1.09
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Per Paul:
As an example of this, I have somewhere around a 320GB disk in
my new laptop. I shrank the C: partition on it, down to 30GB
(with a plan perhaps, in the near future,
Click to expand...

Assuming that you did that without having to re-install the OS,
what utility did you use?
 
All I want to do is break the disk into 6 or so equal parts. The main
Why use FAT? XP work best and I thought only in NTSF?
Click to expand...

I didn't notice the FAT word. But FAT is faster (becasue it's simple)
though it might have fragmentation.


--
@~@ Might, Courage, Vision, SINCERITY.
/ v \ Simplicity is Beauty! May the Force and Farce be with you!
/( _ )\ (x86_64 Ubuntu 9.10) Linux 2.6.37.3
^ ^ 00:44:01 up 1 day 11:05 0 users load average: 1.17 1.08 1.04
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I didn't notice the FAT word. But FAT is faster (becasue it's simple)
though it might have fragmentation.
Click to expand...

I was not clear. If you slice the drive into 6 parts then the drive
is only searching through a File Allocation Table (not FAT32) for 1/6
of the information. I would be formatting NTSF, but I am still
unsure how to slice it. Saving some for later seems like a pretty
good idea.

I am still unsure what happens I only use 1/4 of the drive with only
an extended partition. Without a disk utility, can I add more of the
unallocated space and "end up" with only 4 drive letters? A one time
copy from one partition to another is not unreasonable when I get to
the point of needing more space.
 
(PeteCresswell) said:
Per Paul:

Assuming that you did that without having to re-install the OS,
what utility did you use?
Click to expand...

I used the "shrink" option in Windows 7 Disk Management, which on
its own has the ability to shrink a partition by 50%. To get a
partition smaller than that, I used an evaluation copy of Raxco
PerfectDisk, for its ability to move metadata files in the NTFS
partition, "to the left". By combining the two tools, I was
able to shrink the C: partition to the desired size. Since the
operation was a one time thing, I threw away the eval when I was
finished.

On my WinXP machine, when I was doing stuff like this, I defragmented
the target partitions first, so as much of the data was "to the left"
as was possible. Then, I used Partition Magic for the changes.

I have some things installed, which are just too complicated to meddle
with. For example, I have nothing here I can rely on, for dealing with
UFS file systems. I prefer situations, where I have more than one OS,
that can work on a file system, so if there is an issue with the
file system being "busy", I can come up with a way of working around it.
I was surprised, when the "all purpose toolbox" Linux, wouldn't go
near a UFS, leaving me high and dry. (I think Solaris and FreeBSD can
use UFS. They generally end up living on their own disks.)

Paul
 
I was not clear. If you slice the drive into 6 parts then the drive
is only searching through a File Allocation Table (not FAT32) for 1/6
of the information. I would be formatting NTSF, but I am still
unsure how to slice it. Saving some for later seems like a pretty
good idea.

I am still unsure what happens I only use 1/4 of the drive with only
an extended partition. Without a disk utility, can I add more of the
unallocated space and "end up" with only 4 drive letters? A one time
copy from one partition to another is not unreasonable when I get to
the point of needing more space.
Click to expand...

I guess a lot depends how you "use" the disk. I have a 1 TB disk that
is now holding all my data files. It's broken up into 8 logical disks
(Now, has been less in the past), with sizes ranging from 244 GB down
to 65 GB. In the past when I had a smaller disk for my data files, I
often found myself running out of space in one partition, with still
lots of space in some other partition. I thought about going to a
dynamic disk setup, but my OS won't support that, so I'd end up
copying data off to another small disk, then shrinking a partition,
moving data around, and increasing the size of the partition that i
needed larger. A real PITA, even though I used Batch files and
Robocopy to do the copying. With the 1 TB I was able to "oversize"
every partition, so hopefully I won't go through that again anytime
soon.

I've automated backups to a set of batch files that run at midnight
using Robocopy to copy anything "new" from the data partition(s) to
another hard disk.... using both an internal and a separate external
disk to hold the backups. (I've tried backup software, but prefer to
have backups taht I can easily read, not some encrypted files.)

I personally don't think that leaving a lot of space unoccupied is a
very good idea, unless you forsee the need to add another partition in
the future. That would be the case if you would want to add another
separate category to the filing system. So if you have all your
categories set, and it's 7, I'd go ahead and set up 7 partitions now
and be done with it.
 
After listening to the suggestions, can you do this with XP?
Say I create an extended partition (no primary) that is 1/4 space on
the drive and leave 3/4 unformatted (unallocated?), and make that 4
logical drives. Say I have a very good reason for having 4 different
type files. All I expect to happen is that when I run out of space is
that I just want all 4 drives to double in space.

What happens when I want to use another 1/4 of the space and I don't
really want 8 logical drives? I want 4 drives twice as large.

This make sense to anyone?
Click to expand...

Yes. In fat32 it means you'll be up all night. In the morning you
have a 1.5T drive for 375Meg you allocated for 4 drive letters in an
extended partition. All day you copy data to them. But, it's getting
late and entropy and endless data happens, keeps on streaming, you
change your mind and now want to allocate another 375M equally for
each 94Meg drive letter, which effectively will yield four each at
188Meg drives. Starting with the last physically placed drive
(remember, lettering is arbitrary in XP), that last drive is to be
enlarged and moved farthest away from the next-to-last 94Meg drive.
Upon completion and becoming a 188Meg drive, the next-to-last 94meg
becomes the last drive, and the procedure is repeated until all four
drives are enlarged.

It can be a cumbersome process according to the software, (sizes, data
type, and file systems), as well, during the "enlargement" -- the data
formerly occupying less space is dispersed over a greater space in
"wider" distances between the drive sector and cluster assignments.
This requires disk fragment consolidation, where that same data is
"squeezed" back into a contingent whole.

All of which, we now have established to know, the moving and
expanding of drive, as well subsequently consolidating data, is time
consuming. Therefore, you're going to be up all night, no longer a
simple computer operator, but squeezing boxes like an accordion player.
 
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