Windows 7 Hard Drive Use - Best Practice??

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Jvenables

29 posts

Geek

#61634 20-May-2010 11:12

I am about to rebuild my pc....Was wondering if there is any partition best practice, phyiscal disk best practise....i.e. multiple partitions, 1 for the OS, 1 for applications/Games & one for data?

Or 2 physical disks, 1 for OS, another for everything else and the swap file??

I currently have a 1TB internal & 500GB external...Just wondering if there is any guidelines for best use & what the benefits would be if any??

Any guidance would be appreciated

heavenlywild

4557 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#332248 20-May-2010 11:45

I would say one HDD for OS and one for apps and games.

However, I don't see any significant benefits in speed, unless your HDDs are spinning at different speeds?

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rvangelder

352 posts

Ultimate Geek

#332319 20-May-2010 13:10

I would say separate your documents from your applications.
ie. one hdd for windows and apps, one hdd for documents

I say 2 hdd, but you could equally get away with 2 partitions.
You want to be thinking about backups as a separate exercise.

I recommend it for 3 reasons:

1.
Keep your Applications and Operating System on the same partition. There's little point to separating them. If you reinstall your operating system, you wont be able to just doubleclick D:\Apps\Microsoft\Office\Excel.exe and see it work. Installed applications just aren't that modular.

2.
With Windows 7 you have a concept of Libraries. Many folders to one library.
For example, you could have D:\Documents as the one and only folder for the Documents library.

The idea being that if you feel you need to reinstall Windows (that lives on C:), you can do so without risking your most important documents (living on D:).

3.
Applications don't change that much. They get installed, and sit there occupying the same space on disk.
High usage folders (like documents) claim, then abandon sections of disk. The allocation / deallocation is a contributor to disk fragmentation (not a scary thing btw). Fragmentation can be isolated to it's own area of disk.