[WEB4LIB] Partioning Drives

[Keith Higgs]

Here are my thoughts on this.

For Windoze systems I like a 3 partition design.  

1) the system partition that will contain the OS and any programs that
truly have to be on that drive because the developer had their head up
their ... , and other tools that interface directly with the OS such as
Norton AntiVirus. I also put the programs I load/unload most often
there. This is the fastest, most quickly accessed part of the drive and
I want things I use most to load as quickly as possible. 

2) Because I sometimes work with some extremely large files I create a 1
to 2 GB partition that holds my Windows swap file. I also point the
system environment variables for TEMP and TMP to a folder on that
partition as well as my own TMP a/o TEMP files. I hate waiting for disk
writes when I'm working with Photoshop so I force the temp files to go
to the next fastest part of the drive.

3) Finally, the remainder of the drive is dedicated to user data
storage.

Bonus features:
* Security - your data is not contiguous with the stuff that accesses it
so it's more difficult for intruders to find.
* Safety - If your system partition is damaged and you have to reformat
and reinstall you still have all of your working data.
* Flexibility - If you find a need to migrate from whatever to Linux you
can rededicate that swap partition to be a Linux installation on a dual
boot system.  Just make sure the Linux boot partition starts before
cylinder 1024 - Not normally a problem on most of the newer drives.

If drive access speed is slowing you down you may want to consider a
multi-disk RAID 5 configuration.  Even with software RAID5
implementations the access time for 4 10GB drives is significantly less
than the access time for a single 40GB drive in terms of waiting for
your file to read or write. Hardware RAID implementations improve the
situation even more.  Additionally, in most cases using RAID 5 if one of
your drives fails you can pull it out and pop in a new one without
losing data.  The data is striped across all drives with a certain
amount of redundancy so the replaced drive can be reconstructed.

D. Keith Higgs <mailto:dkh2 at po.cwru.edu>
 Case Western Reserve University, Webmaster - University Library
 Additional Information at http://www.cwru.edu/UL/
"Follow the white rabbit."


-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib at webjunction.org [mailto:web4lib at webjunction.org]
On Behalf Of GRAY, PAUL
Sent: Thursday, July 25, 2002 05:25 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Partioning Drives


Over the years I have wavered between partioning the workstation hard
drives and and leaving them as a single C:

I lean toward leaving everything as C: mainly because most programs'
installation programs list C: as the default location and some really
don't seem to like to run from anywhere else.

I understand, though, that keeping the operating system on a seperate
partition from installed apps and other data is supposed to improve
security and performance.

Does anyone have good reasons pro or con on partitioning?

I'm running W2K on stations with hard drives ranging from 8 - 20 gig.

Thanks
Paul H. Gray
Library Manager - LAN & CLC
TCC Northeast Campus
Hurst, TX
817-515-6623