The best partition for a 250 GB drive

[skyhydro]

I just got a 250GB WD drive that I'm thinking to use as the boot disk.
I have two other physical disks with 60 GM each which I intend to use
for data. My question is what is the optimal partition size for a 250
GB drive for the best performance under WinXP?

Is there a performance issue if I leave the whole drive in one
partition? Is there a way to optimize the cluster size for a single
250 GB partition?


I have a KD7 RAID MB, 1.9GH Athlon, 1.3G RAM, ...

TIA

 

[aswh]

I just got a 250GB WD drive that I'm thinking to use as the boot disk.
I have two other physical disks with 60 GM each which I intend to use
for data. My question is what is the optimal partition size for a 250
GB drive for the best performance under WinXP?

Is there a performance issue if I leave the whole drive in one
partition? Is there a way to optimize the cluster size for a single
250 GB partition?


I have a KD7 RAID MB, 1.9GH Athlon, 1.3G RAM, ...

TIA

As I understand it, some utilities don't work with partitions larger
than 128G, so I kept mine to two partitions of less than 128G and a
couple of small partitions for pagefile and a download area.

Oh and about a 16G for system and programs. I used to put programs on
their own partition but it was too much hassle and bother. Just put
them where they WANT to be.

Cluster size is pretty much dependent on what kind of data you're
storing. e.g. video or jpgs. I just use 4k.

Get yourself a decent defragmenter program. I had to dump the win2k
defragmenter because it couldn't handle the MTF reserved zone on the
big drive without screwing it all up. PerfectDisk fixed all problems.

 

[skyhydro]

Thanks for the response. I ended up making the whole thing one
partition with WinXp SP1. I too don't want to bother with programs
partition and such. This time I want to put everything on one drive.
My next task is to unraid my two 60GB drives since I've had few close
calls. If one goes down I will lose everything. Not worth the minimal
speed gain.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

Thanks for the response. I ended up making the whole thing one
partition with WinXp SP1. I too don't want to bother with programs
partition and such. This time I want to put everything on one drive.

My next task is to unraid my two 60GB drives since I've had few close
calls. If one goes down I will lose everything.

Yes, quite a difference to single drive usage.
When that goes down you won't lose everything, obviously.

 

[skyhydro]

I get your point but I intend to use my unraided drives for data and backup.
I want to be more careful with my data and don't much care if I lose my
programs on the large partition drive. With a single drive, if it goes down,
you stand a better chance of getting your data back. I do believe that there
is a better chances of getting data back when using non-raid-0 drives. When
one of the drives on a raid-0 goes down the chances of getting data back is
slim to none. I had a power supply that went bad and fried the hard disk
when the 12V went to 18V. It wouldn't even spin. I went to a local store and
purchased a new drive identical to the one that died. Took the circuit board
off the new drive and placed it on the dead one. May be I was lucky but I
got all the data back. There are different opinions about raid-0, I don't
think it's worth the risk especially if you have important data.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

I get your point but I intend to use my unraided drives for data and backup.
I want to be more careful with my data and don't much care if I lose my
programs on the large partition drive. With a single drive, if it goes down,
you stand a better chance of getting your data back.

As for software RAID0 and logical errors, sure.
For hardware RAID0 it should not matter. Same tools should apply.

I do believe that there is a better chances of
getting data back when using non-raid-0 drives.

When one of the drives on a raid-0 goes down the chances of getting data
back is slim to none.
Why?

I had a power supply that went bad and fried the hard disk
when the 12V went to 18V. It wouldn't even spin. I went to a local store and
purchased a new drive identical to the one that died. Took the circuit board
off the new drive and placed it on the dead one. May be I was lucky but I
got all the data back. There are different opinions about raid-0, I don't
think it's worth the risk especially if you have important data.

You *always* need to backup, RAID or not.

[snip]

 

[skyhydro]

With Raid-0, the data are physically spread over 2 drives, hence the speed.
If one of the drives is lost, all of the data are lost. To the best of my
knowledge, there are no tools that can recover data from only one of the 2
raid-0 drives.

With the same 2 drives but not configured as raid-0, if one drive dies,
you'd lose half the amount of data as in a raid-0 configuration.

I get your point but I intend to use my unraided drives for data and backup.
I want to be more careful with my data and don't much care if I lose my
programs on the large partition drive. With a single drive, if it goes down,
you stand a better chance of getting your data back.

As for software RAID0 and logical errors, sure.
For hardware RAID0 it should not matter. Same tools should apply.

I do believe that there is a better chances of
getting data back when using non-raid-0 drives.

When one of the drives on a raid-0 goes down the chances of getting data
back is slim to none.
Why?

I had a power supply that went bad and fried the hard disk
when the 12V went to 18V. It wouldn't even spin. I went to a local store and
purchased a new drive identical to the one that died. Took the circuit board
off the new drive and placed it on the dead one. May be I was lucky but I
got all the data back. There are different opinions about raid-0, I don't
think it's worth the risk especially if you have important data.

You *always* need to backup, RAID or not.

[snip]

 

[Mr. Grinch]

(e-mail address removed) (skyhydro) wrote in

I just got a 250GB WD drive that I'm thinking to use as the boot disk.
I have two other physical disks with 60 GM each which I intend to use
for data. My question is what is the optimal partition size for a 250
GB drive for the best performance under WinXP?

Is there a performance issue if I leave the whole drive in one
partition? Is there a way to optimize the cluster size for a single
250 GB partition?


I have a KD7 RAID MB, 1.9GH Athlon, 1.3G RAM, ...

TIA

My drive layout today:

IBM GXP 22GB on motherboard primary ATA/33
- drive C: fat32 3GB for WinME
- drive D: fat32 4GB for Server 2003
- drive E: fat32 remainer 14GB for Apps

IBM GXP 22GB on motherboard secondary ATA/33
- drive F: fat32 21GB for games and page file

Maxtor DM+ 40GB on Promise TX133 ATA card
- drive G: fat32 38GB downloads

Maxtor DM9 160GB 7200rpm on Promise TX133 ATA card
- drive H: ntfs 152GB "scratch" disk, temp files, files bigger than 2GB,
"test"

Maxtor DM 160GB 5400rpm on Promise TX133 ATA card
- drive I: fat32 152GB for Data, anything I think is important enough to
keep, and ghost backups of my OS partitions.

System is a Tyan Tiger 100 S1832DL , Dual P3-800, 1GB, MSI Ti4200TX AGP
vid, SBLive sound, Compaq Netelligent 10/100 nic, Promise TX133 ATA card,
Justlink 20x cdr and TDK 4X indiDVD, Antec SX1000 case. System was
bought in Sept. 1998 as a single P2-400 with 128MB ram. The extra $100
cdn for the dual cpu motherboard was well worth it, if only for the extra
PCI slot alone. I've "upgraded" it along the way and it's time to get
something new. Still, it makes a great terminal server and app server.
It runs Xnews binary decodes and various P2P apps without noticable
slowdown at speeds over 300 kbyte/sec, and runs Maya / Photoshop faster
than a lot of my friend's computers or the ones at work.

While I would like to try Raid 0 or 5 for home use, I think it's always
good to question if it's really of any benefit to your particular usage.
Not everyone uses the same apps or uses them the same way; "your mileage
will vary."

You still can get some speed benefits even though you're not using Raid 0
anymore. For example: splitting things across multiple drives. The most
obvious is to have the page file on a seldom used drive. Another is to
move other frequently accessed apps or data to their own drive. I used
to have OS, Apps, Data, Page all on separate drives and it does make a
difference (for me). Now that I run Server 2003 most of the time, the
OS seems to need much less disk access to OS files than under W2K, so
running both apps and OS on the same physical disk doesn't seem to cause
as much thrashing as before.

I have not found a big need or benefit for NTFS at home. At work it's a
necessity to have ACLS for security but at home everything is left pretty
much open. I haven't noticed much of a speed benefit either; maybe I'm
just not testing anything that would show a difference. But it's handy
to experiment with 2003 ntfs features and also if you have files bigger
than 2GB. I still use WinME for games which explains why I need fat32
still. I've tried NFS for Win98 but it would often crash shortly after
boot so I've not tried since.

I've always found it handy to have a fat32 partition that I can use to do
Ghost backups of my boot OS partitions. Supposedly the latest version
can ghost to NTFS but I'm not sure how. At any rate disk image software
is a very quick way to recover your OS... takes 2 min for my winME
partition and about 5 for the 2003 partition to do a restore.

I'm looking forward to wide availability of 300+ GB drives... it will
make it easy for people to make their own 1TB of raid storage for media
servers with all their music / video / recording needs. No more need for
walls of VHS tapes and multiple media devices etc.

 

[Mr. Grinch]

I'm not sure, but I think the previous poster is aware of that. What is
suggesting is that if regular backups are performed, as should be done no
matter what drive config is used. it's still possible to restore from
those. Of course making a backup and restoring it are two different
things... a lot of people never bother to test their restores.

Your point is still valid however, in the non-raid config, you'd only use
half the amount of data. This might mean you'd only have to restore half
the amount of data, depending on the time sensitivity of it.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

With Raid-0, the data are physically spread over 2 drives, hence the speed.

Yes, I know what Raid0 is.

If one of the drives is lost, all of the data are lost.

To the best of my knowledge, there are no tools that can recover data
from only one of the 2 raid-0 drives.

Yes and neither can you from a single drive (that died).
We have been over that already, you are repeating yourself.

With the same 2 drives but not configured as raid-0, if one drive dies,
you'd lose half the amount of data as in a raid-0 configuration.

Yes, but then there isn't any case of 'getting data back'
as half of the data was never lost in the first place.

There is no difference for recovering logically lost data from a single
drive and from hardware/firmware Raid0.
Software Raid0 is the exception for those applications that work through
bios and can't see the software raid.

I get your point but I intend to use my unraided drives for data and backup.
I want to be more careful with my data and don't much care if I lose my
programs on the large partition drive. With a single drive, if it goes down,
you stand a better chance of getting your data back.

As for software RAID0 and logical errors, sure.
For hardware RAID0 it should not matter. Same tools should apply.

I do believe that there is a better chances of
getting data back when using non-raid-0 drives.

When one of the drives on a raid-0 goes down the chances of getting data
back is slim to none.
Why?

I had a power supply that went bad and fried the hard disk
when the 12V went to 18V. It wouldn't even spin. I went to a local store and
purchased a new drive identical to the one that died. Took the circuit board
off the new drive and placed it on the dead one. May be I was lucky but I
got all the data back. There are different opinions about raid-0, I don't
think it's worth the risk especially if you have important data.

You *always* need to backup, RAID or not.

Thanks for the response. I ended up making the whole thing one
partition with WinXp SP1. I too don't want to bother with programs
partition and such. This time I want to put everything on one drive.

My next task is to unraid my two 60GB drives since I've had few close
calls. If one goes down I will lose everything.

Yes, quite a difference to single drive usage.
When that goes down you won't lose everything, obviously.

Not worth the minimal speed gain.



(e-mail address removed) wrote in message On 9 Nov 2003 13:05:53 -0800, (e-mail address removed) (skyhydro) wrote:

[snip]

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

I'm not sure, but I think the previous poster is aware of that. What is
suggesting is that if regular backups are performed, as should be done no
matter what drive config is used. it's still possible to restore from
those. Of course making a backup and restoring it are two different
things... a lot of people never bother to test their restores.

Your point is still valid however, in the non-raid config, you'd only use
half the amount of data.

Say what?