Primary vs. logical partitions in V64

[drogos]

Ok finally have put my new PC together (i920 platform). Vista64 was kind of an obvious choice. Got little confused when I was about to divide my HDDs into partitions. SInce good old DOS and fdisk times I was used to creating one primary partition for system C: and extended partition with bunch of logical partitions......no go in Vista. It only let's you create primary partitions. On top of that software like Partition Magic supposidly doeasn't work on vista. Here comes my question. I have 3 HDDs and need 8 partitions in total on those. 8 primary partitions ???? I mean I don't care if it doesn't affect my system and data. Any difference between these 2 types of partitions in every day computing?????

[Motley]

Just wondering why you "need 8 partitions" on 3 hd's?? Having all primary partitions doesn't matter, won't affect your data.

I know it's best to have your OS partition dedicated, but I always wonder people like to make so many partitions? I mean, data is data, just how you get to it, organization by partitions, what exactly does it do for you?

System OS on C:
Say you have pictures on D:
Games on E:
Videos on F:

OK, great, now what if you had:
System OS on C:
pictures on D:\pics
games on D:\games
videos on D:\videos

See my point?

[drogos]

1) partitions help prevent excessive fragmentation or rather allows the heads to "travel" less to read data
2) PS and LR for best performance need scratch disk preferably on different hdd or at least on different partition than OS or data,
3) Ever lost a partition ???? You lose partition, you loose only data that it contained not everything
4) last but not least I could just reverse your question. Why not partitions rather than folders? Because I can ?? Beacuase it only helps system and data maintanace and because I like it that way.

[jetboy]

I've never lost a partion (or a drive at that matter), but, would think that you're more likely to lose the drive and all partitions on that drive before just a single partition residing on it. I could be wrong.

As for partioning your drive into multiple partitions in Vista, I actually did this when I first installed the OS. You should have seen a partition manager during the install and could set the drive and sizes there. Or, have you attempted to partion from your disk management? Try this...

1. Right click "Computer" (or My Computer, can't remember what Vista calls it) and select "Manage"... Then follow these instructions that I found at http://en.kioskea.net/forum/affich-10590-partition-and-formatting posted by Jowie (gotta give credit where credit is due).

2. In the Navigation pane, under Storage, click Disk Management.

3. Right-click an unallocated region on your hard disk and then click New Simple Volume.

4. In the New Simple Volume Wizard click Next

5. Type the size of the volume you want to create in MB (40GB = 40000 MB) or accept the maximum default size.

6. Accept the default drive letter or choose a different drive letter and then click next

7. In the Format Partition dialog box click next then finish.

Hope that works in V64. It does for the x86.

[drogos]

I've never lost a partion (or a drive at that matter), but, would think that you're more likely to lose the drive and all partitions on that drive before just a single partition residing on it. I could be wrong.

As for partioning your drive into multiple partitions in Vista, I actually did this when I first installed the OS. You should have seen a partition manager during the install and could set the drive and sizes there. Or, have you attempted to partion from your disk management? Try this...

1. Right click "Computer" (or My Computer, can't remember what Vista calls it) and select "Manage"... Then follow these instructions that I found at http://en.kioskea.net/forum/affich-10590-partition-and-formatting posted by Jowie (gotta give credit where credit is due).

2. In the Navigation pane, under Storage, click Disk Management.

3. Right-click an unallocated region on your hard disk and then click New Simple Volume.

4. In the New Simple Volume Wizard click Next

5. Type the size of the volume you want to create in MB (40GB = 40000 MB) or accept the maximum default size.

6. Accept the default drive letter or choose a different drive letter and then click next

7. In the Format Partition dialog box click next then finish.

Hope that works in V64. It does for the x86.

Yeah, sure I know. My problem was that I wasn't able to create logical partitions, only primary. Wasn't sure if that affects anything. Already partitioned everything into primary partitions so it's all good again :)

[jetboy]

Oh... I thought Disk Management had the option for logical partitions. I coulda been wrong. Glad its worked out though.

[KarlosDaJackal]

There is a limit of 4 primary partitions per disk drive. Primary partitions are also the only ones a windows OS will boot from.

To create logical drives you need to created an extended partition (using one of the primary slots) and then you can have as many logical partitions inside the extended partition as you like.

You are correct you can't do this anymore in V64, I just tried with some unallocated space in Vista Ultimate 64 SP1. I think this is just part of a Microsoft strategy to eventually move everybody over to dynamic disks, which I think WinFS was based in. Of course WinFS was dropped in order to get Vista out the door, so we have a crippled after thought of an NTFS file system to deal with.

You loose nothing by using primary partitions, except you are limited to 4 per disk. If you want more you can convert the disk to dynamic, but that is more trouble than its worth (try recover a dynamic disk with a dos disk :cry:)

In terms of everyday performance, basic disks with primary/logical partitions and dynamic disks all behave in the same way.

[Bobster]

this is how i have my Vista64 partitioned

[drogos]

this is how i have my Vista64 partitioned

1) Did you create logical partitions in vista or where these created earlier in xp?
2) you have sratch partition on system drive right?? I decided to put my scratch on a drive different than system drive. I think I heard somewhere that it's good to have sratch disks on non-system drive ...true??

[Bobster]

when setting up Vista, i used a fresh set of 4 drives for RAID10 and just partitioned off the first 35GB for Vista.

once i had Vista setup, i then used the disk management under computer management to set up the other partitions, i let Vista decide what it wanted to do with each partition, i just chose the size of each partition..

re: scratch on system drive/2nd drive, i've never seen a huge improvement moving my scratch to a 2nd drive over having it on the system drive..

current speed of my Photoshop Scratch partition is 93.5MB/Sec so its pretty nippy

[FZ1]

1) partitions help prevent excessive fragmentation or rather allows the heads to "travel" less to read data
2) PS and LR for best performance need scratch disk preferably on different hdd or at least on different partition than OS or data,
3) Ever lost a partition ???? You lose partition, you loose only data that it contained not everything
4) last but not least I could just reverse your question. Why not partitions rather than folders? Because I can ?? Beacuase it only helps system and data maintanace and because I like it that way.

Depending on the drive(s) you are using, partitioning may not help with performance at all and may truly be hurting performance. I would suggest running in a RAID 0 configuration but if you are concerned about data loss, use a RAID 5 configuration. Also, SSD's are just now starting to hit the market. OCZ is releasing a few models this week that show a lot of promise and aren't too expensive but are definitely more pricey than conventional HDD's. There are a few 10,000 RPM drives out there too that provide outstanding performance. Scratch drives really are not necessary anymore.

[Bobster]

RAID10 FTW tbh..

10,000RPM drives show little performance increase over 7,200RPM drives, infact some are better than the Raptor in transfer speeds..

[FZ1]

RAID10 FTW tbh..

10,000RPM drives show little performance increase over 7,200RPM drives, infact some are better than the Raptor in transfer speeds..
Depends on the benchmark...I hear WD as some 15,000 RPM drives coming - Cheetahs?

[Bobster]

Depends on the benchmark...I hear WD as some 15,000 RPM drives coming - Cheetahs?
well wasn't a benchmark, was real world performance ;)

[Faolan]

Try 3x15k SAS drives in RAID 5 on an Adaptec controller... That's fast ;)

For reference Seagate just released 600Gb 15k drives this week!