Best practices for partitioning a hard disk

I'm often asked, "What's the best way to partition your hard drive?" Typically, I answer, "What do you mean by 'best'? Are you looking for the best performance? Best reliability? Best usability?" There's no single answer to how you should partition hard disks on a computer running Windows XP. What I can offer are some suggestions based on my personal experience.

Depending on your budget and goals, you can choose the solution that works best for your system. In this column, I'll focus on three areas where your partitioning scheme can really make a difference:

• Organizing your work

• Safeguarding your data

• Boosting your computer's performance


I'll describe the partitions I created for my computer and explain the benefits you can gain from dividing your hard disk into more than the single partition and hard drive that it originally came with. These benefits can help you be better organized, more productive, and ensure the integrity of your data.

Overview of my partitioning scheme

Partitioning helps me manage my work, especially on the computer that I use most for my writing. The figure below shows the two physical disks partitioned as follows:

• Disk 0 has a System partition (drive C) and a Data partition (drive D).

• Disk 1 has an Archive partition (drive E), a Research partition (drive F), an Other partition (drive G), and a Paging partition (drive H).

Here's how you might set up a partitioning scheme similar to mine. You can adapt these steps to meet your own needs:

1.
Install Windows on drive C on your first hard disk.

2.
Create a second partition on your first disk to store your active work files, and keep it fairly small so you can maintain it more easily. Unless your work is graphic design or video production, since your work files will be much larger.

3.
Install a second hard disk on your computer and create at least two partitions on it, one for your paging file and the other for archiving old work files and other important files like your Outlook PST file.

4.
Create additional partitions on your second disk only if they will contain files that are infrequently accessed to minimize contention with the paging file partition.


Organize your work
Whether you use your PC for work or play (or both), partitioning your hard drives appropriately can help you keep organized. Disk partitioning is invaluable to me, because I'm a notoriously disorganized person. My desk tells the tale—piles of paper all over the place, sticky notes attached to monitors and walls, stacks of open books, and leftover crumbs from snacking. You can imagine what my hard drives must look like.

What's the value of using my partitioning scheme? Installing the operating system and applications on a dedicated partition (System) provides these benefits:

• Makes my computer easier to maintain without worrying about losing work when things go wrong.

• Need to defragment this partition only after I install a new application, which is rarely because my computer is dedicated to writing and editing work, not fun and games (I have other computers for that).

• Can easily use System Restore if something goes wrong so I don't lose time from my work.


I store all my active work files on drive D and keep the folder structure on this drive simple: one main folder for each project I'm working on. My Data partition is fairly small at 2 GB. (This small size usually works unless you work in video production or graphic design, in which case your work files may be huge.) The small-sized partition and folder structure help me:

• Find my work quickly and keep it organized.

• Promptly move suspended or inactive projects to the Other partition until I need them or until they're ready to be archived to the Archive partition.

• Defragment the Data partition more quickly, which further reduces potential downtime.


This last item may not seem like a big issue since you can schedule defragmentation to occur during off hours. But as a writer, I often find myself getting out of bed in the middle of the night to outline an idea. It's painful to wait for your computer to finish a process before you can use it.

Tip: I also have a Research partition on my second disk. That's where I save copies of white papers and other background material I find while doing research for a writing project. Most writers are packrats and I'm no exception. Keeping such research separate from my own writing helps ensure I don't accidentally merge text someone else wrote with my own work.

I've tried other partitioning schemes to organize my work and found them wanting. For example, on a previous computer I had six partitions instead of four on the second hard disk. I found out the hard way however that these smaller partitions filled up faster, so I either had to save my work on partitions where it didn't belong or spend extra time moving whole volumes of data from one drive to another—not fun. So now I keep things simple with just enough partitions to help me stay organized.


Safeguard your data
The Archive partition on my second physical disk is a large partition that I use for backing up data quickly. This helps protect my work from disappearing should my first physical disk fail.

What I do to protect my work is simple. At the end of each day, whether my current writing project is finished or not, I do the following:

1.
Copy its subfolder (for example, D:\Expert Zone\January 2005) from my Data partition to a new subfolder I created in my Archive partition.

2.
Name the new subfolder in Archive by date and project, for example E:\050109 Expert Zone, which indicates a backup of writing I did for Expert Zone on January 9, 2005. Keeping the date first in subfolder names helps me more easily find something I was working on a few days ago in case I need to restore an earlier version of a document.


3.
If I've been working on multiple projects that day, I copy each project's subfolder from Data to a separate new subfolder on Archive, with each of these new subfolders having the same YYMMDD but a different project name appended.


But instead of manually copying files like this, why don't I just run the Backup or Restore Wizard to save incremental or differential backups on my Archive partition? Basically, because I'm impatient—if I need access to old files from a project I'm working on, I don't want to have to have to restore the data from backup first. I can also usually find what I want faster by browsing for it by YYMMDD-dated folder than by searching through a backup catalog for the right file.

Tip: I do use Archive for one standard backup though. I back up my System partition using Automated System Recovery (ASR) and store this backup on the Archive partition.

My Archive partition tends to fill up pretty fast however because I am always saving temporary versions of my work as I go along. So in addition to having two physical disks on my computer, I also have a CD-R drive that I use to burn CDs for two purposes:

• At the end of each month I copy last month's Archive subfolders to CD, label it by date, and put it somewhere safe. That way I have last month's backup ready if both my hard disks fail from a lightning bolt hitting my office, or my computer is infected with a virus, or a thief steals my computer.

• When my Archive partition is approximately 80 percent full, I copy several months of the oldest backup files to CD and then delete them from the Archive folder to reclaim space.


I also copy my Outlook .pst file to my Archive partition once a month. Like most writers, I depend heavily on e-mail and can't afford to lose old e-mail messages or contacts. Since .pst files can be fairly big, I usually keep only a few months of them archived this way. And I copy my current .pst file to CD every few months and delete older .pst files from drive E to reclaim space for other backups. Once I've safely saved my current .pst file, I go through Outlook mercilessly deleting folders for projects I'm no longer working on.

Boost performance
Although a PC used for writing doesn't need to be a high-performance computer, its performance can be improved by a good partitioning scheme. The biggest boost comes from my Paging partition on drive H, which is found on my second physical disk. I use this partition to boost performance in the following ways:

• Move the paging file there. A well-known method for improving performance on a Windows-based computer is to move the paging file (pagefile.sys) from its usual location on drive C to its own separate partition on a separate physical drive.

• Keep the Paging partition small (4 GB). By default the initial size of your paging file is 1.5 × RAM and its maximum size is 3 × RAM. So if your computer has 1 GB of RAM, which is pretty good for a desktop productivity computer, then setting your Paging partition to 4 GB gives you more than enough room for your paging file without wasting disk space that could be used for other purposes like storing data.

• Format it using the FAT32 file system. Although the version of NTFS in Windows XP has features that make it perform better than earlier versions of NTFS, you can still eek out some performance gains for small volumes by formatting them as FAT32 instead of NTFS. I'm not overly concerned about the lack of security from not having pagefile.sys protected by NTFS permissions since it's an unreadable binary file. If someone hacked into my system, they wouldn't need to bother with the paging file anyway.

• Replace old 5400 rpm drives with newer 7200 or 10000 rpm drives. If you have the budget, you can speed performance of disk activity by installing one of these faster drives.


If you have IDE drives, you can also boost file system performance by setting both physical disks as masters on separate channels. That way data can flow freely and simultaneously between both disks and the system bus. This setup allows Windows to access and load system files while simultaneously paging to disk. The end result—increased performance. Of course, Paging isn't the only partition I have on my second disk. But since I only access the Archive and Other partitions only a few times per day, the disk is pretty much dedicated to paging activity. But overall the biggest performance gain is usually achieved by moving your paging file to a partition on a separate drive as described above, especially on a system that has limited physical memory. Buying more RAM is of course another way to boost performance.

Tip: NTFS tweaks can also help squeeze some additional performance as I describe in NTFS Performance Hacks.


Whether you spend most of your time working or playing on your system, partitioning your disks appropriately can help you keep your work organized, your data safe, and your system humming along. Of course, don't forget to back up all your data before you start partitioning your disks!


Taken from microsoft official site.