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I'm an IT Tech with my own
computer consultation business. I'm also a moderator at
PC Abusers Forums and answer
a lot of technical questions there (my forum nick is FlyingPenguin).
ZEN
AND THE ART OF HARD DRIVE PARTITIONING
(Partitioning for power users)
Updated 12/3/06
There are some real good reasons why
you should use several small partitions instead of one or two large ones
on your hard drive - ESPECIALLY with today's very large drives, high
density drives: data
integrity, redundancy, ease of backups, ease of defragmentation, ease of
repair.
Although there's nothing that will save your data if you suffer a massive
hard drive crash, most disk corruption is usually a soft corruption of the
MFT (Master File Table). If you have one big partition then a
trashed MFT will put all your data at risk. By segregating everything into
smaller partitions, you often limit the damage to only the one partition
that suffered the actual damage to it's MFT - it won't affect any others
as long as it's not a large physical disk crash, or an electronics
failure. It's also a heck of a lot faster to scandisk and defrag
smaller partitions than one big one.
Another benefit is easy recovery from a virus or trojan infection. It's
almost hopeless trying to remove one of these nowadays. Modern rootkit
based trojans are hard to detect and impossible to remove. There's no way
you can ever trust a compromised system afterwards. Assuming you make
regular backup images (using Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image) of your
boot and apps partitions, if you get infected by something nasty you can
just restore back to a known good image.
If you work with editing video, it's a good idea to make a big empty
partition just for storing large RAW video you're editing. When you're done with the
project, instead of defragging the drive you just delete all the files off
of it (no need to defrag an empty drive!) and you're ready for the next
project.
You can also segregate your data to make backups MUCH easier and keep your
data more secure. I STRONGLY believe that ALL your data should be located
on a different partition (or better yet different drive) than the boot/OS
partition.
Here's how my hard drive is partitioned:
I have WinXP in it's own partition. Nothing else is installed in that
partition except the OS.
Apps are ALL installed in the D partition partition (I do NOT
install ANY apps in the OS partition! If the app's installer allows me an
option to change the default install path I always install it in the D
partition). Some things will still go into the OS partition that you can't
help (Office for instance puts all the common DLL files in the same
partition as the OS), so the OS partition WILL grow slowly over time - you
need to leave enough room for that. You also want enough room for your
swap file, but the boot partition doesn't have to be very large: 10 Gb is
more than adequate for Windows XP if you're careful not to let anything
install in the C partition. Use 15 or 20 if you want to play safe and you
have a big drive.
Games ONLY go in one of my three game partitions. The Temp partition is
for downloads, IE & Firefox caches, Winzip extract folder, etc (temporary
stuff).
The Scratch partition is for temp storage of files to be burned on a CD-R,
or DVD-R, storing large files like Norton Ghost drive images, client projects and temp files for apps that need a LOT of temp storage (like
Photoshop).
The Video partition is used only for video editing and storing video
files.
All my data (and I mean EVERYTHING) is located on the data partition:
Documents folder (instructions
on moving your Documents folder here), client web pages, favorites
folder, Outlook Express user files & address book (instructions
for moving your Outlook Express mail folders and address book here),
and any data files from apps that don't use the My Documents folder. This
makes it obscenely easy to backup my data weekly - I just Norton Ghost the
whole data partition.
To make a backup of the system for easy recovery in case of a serious HDD
crash, I use Norton Ghost to make an image of my OS, Apps and Data
partitions. I used to put the image files on 3 or 4 CD-Rs but now I burn
them to a single DVD-R.
In my case I also backup my data files to a server and to a pocket USB
Compact Flash memory stick daily (love those things), but it's a
no-brainer to just make a Ghost image of the whole data partition on a
monthly, weekly or even daily basis if you like.
I don't bother making a ghost image of anything else - games are easy to
re-install, the temp partition has nothing important, and the scratch
partitions are just temporary stuff. Anything important like client Ghost
images gets burned (I never ghost directly to a CD or DVD - it's MUCH
faster to ghost to another partition and then burn it later).
I carry these Ghost images, the latest data backup, my OS install CD as
well as CD-R copies of all the important apps I need in a small CD valise
in my briefcase. In an emergency I can restore my stuff to a new hard
drive, or even a different computer, and be up and running in an hour or
two. It's saved my bacon twice already.
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