partitions counterproductive?

[allan]

Partitions make sense for any number of reasons, the two foremost being safety (if you keep data separate from OS, you won't lose it if you ever lose access to your boot drive and have to blow it away and reformat); and good housekeeping (keeping OS separate from data separate from cache files and paging file, etc). There is absolutely, positively no significant downside to partitioning your drive (unless it is very small).

 

[Perris Calderon]

thanx allan...I was hoping you'd have something to offer on this, and as I said, I'm mostly trying to figure out if the microsoft document is in fact, true, as I'm sure many ms docs. have not been...and yes, I understand that even if the doc. is acurate, the differance in performance would hardly be noticeable.

 

[Brad]

there is no reason to partition if all you are looking for is performance. the only reason to partition is that if there are applications and/or files that absolutely HAVE to be on a computer, or just do not want to be lost, then partitioning is what you want. partitioning is just a logical division in the drive. it treats the full hard drive as two seperate ones. that is all it does.

Brad

 

[Perris Calderon]

xxbigeyedfishxx, VERY GOOD POINTS, here are the counter pOINTS;

No one should use their hard drive as there backup, hard drives fail all the time.

It really doesn't mean anything to have a logical partition, logical for you, is not logical for your os....for instance, although it's a single physical partition for you, it is allready virtually partitioned by your computor, example, all my programs are in the virtual partition called programs, etc, just knowing your similar stuff is located in a similar area physically does not put it in a similar area VIRTUALLY, or as far as the os is concerned.

Therefore, you must backup all your files outside the box, and let the os handle it's own "virtual partitions" the way that's best suited for best performance.

 

[Brad]

true true...however that usually goes without saying to backup outside of the box. everyone that reads this has to know: all hard drives fail. Its just a matter of when.

Brad

 

[Gnu]

Backing up outside the box is generally a good idea, but not always practical -- which is why it's not entirely fair to say that backing up to hard drives is useless. Redundant RAID was created for this very purpose. I also often batch large backups to other hard drives on the network.

Yes, having logical partitions on your hard drive CAN potentially insert perfomance issues, since your partition table is more complex and you're managing multiple MFTs.