To partition or not to partition?

[BoxDJ]

Hello everyone,

I recently bought a new HDD for my laptop and I'm wondering if I should partition. One partition would be for installing programs and the other would be for storage. Would this increase the speed of my laptop? Will it have any benefits?

Thanks,
BoxDJ

[simpli.cissimus]

Two hard drives...!!!

Separate the sounds from the programs with two hard drives.
If you make partitions to separate them, they still run through the same cable.

I use a small hard drive 160Gb for the operating system.
The second drive with 500GB has three partitions.

One is just for the Live sounds folder and my other samples.
The other partition is just for storage.

The third is where I direct all downloads from my browser,
and other stuff not related to music.
This is where I unpack and so, till I decide where the thing has to be stored finally.
My internet browser is set to download to this hog-drive,
so that my main partition stays clean and de-fragmented all the time.

Guys...! I just realized...
I'm a nerd !!!

[BoxDJ]

I don't have two hard drives for my laptop and I probably will not be purchasing another one for a while.

But are you suggesting that if I do partition, I should store programs, samples, vst's in one partition, then the rest for storage?

[fx23]

you could partition in 2, one for system/pgms/vst, one for storage/database, that's the usual way.
that way if the system is corrupt you can format C while keeping your data on D.
if you want go further some make a 3rd partition, putting a ghost of C once all installed to quick reinstall without
having to reinstall all the os, vst, softs ect.
if 160 i usually do 40 for system, 110 for storage and 10 for swap/ghost, but depends if lot of soft to have to install on C.
in terms of pure speed you won't gain that much, as there is indeed only one physical access, but the datas will be organized so
acces quicker as the hd heads stay in same zone while accessing datas, les defrag, easier defrag and maintenance, but the main advantage is in case of pb with system.

[Tarekith]

With today's hard drive speeds, there's very little reason to partition a HD anymore, with one exception. Because the outer sectors of a drive hold more data per revolution, creating a smaller partition there and using it for any current music projects means that technically you can get more disk throughput for those files. This only works if you keep this partition fairly small (<40GB on a 500GB drive), and this partition MUST be the first one, since the first partition is the outermost one.

Pretty easy to do this with OSX, I honestly don't know how well Windows works when the OS is not installed on the first partition.

With all that in mind, I've done this in the past myself and honestly never noticed any issues or real-world improvements with either method.

[ark]

I avoid partitioning disks because I don't know how to pick the partition sizes so that I don't run out of space on one partition while there is still lots of space left on the others.