Just a general topic related to Hard Drives.

With HD’s approaching the Terra Byte size what would you consider partitioning it down to?

Would you prefer to use several smaller, independent drives if you required that amount of space? Makes sense if one was concerned about a fatal HD crash!

Are there any hard and fast rules?

Thinking that maintenance - defragmentation would take forever on a single Terra Byte drive this is my thoughts on it assuming I was building a new Duo Core 2 ‘Vista’ machine from scratch:-

C:\ 4 GB solid state drive just for the OS. (This may be too small for Vista but from what I have read it can be used for Xp Professional)

Hard Drive

D:\ 100 GB - Back up OS and Program Files

E:\ 50 GB - Frequently accessed Data Files (The most likely to get fragmented)

F:\ 50 GB - Infrequently accessed Data Files

I’d probably partition the remainder 800 GB into something like 2 x 400 GB Drives for things like Music, Videos and the like that should not get fragmented once loaded.

On reflection I’ll stick too a 250 GB HD and build on it with additional drives as required. What do you think?

My best performance system at my business:

CPU AMD fx-53 (bought before the core2duo came out which is the current top performer)

2Gb ram (dual channel)

1 WD 740GD (Raptor) 10000 RPM drive, single partition holding Windows and all programs

1 WD 740GD (Raptor) where the swapfile gets written to, and used for data by running programs, e.g. DV files when editing...

3 400 GB WD drives for file storage, each just one single partition.

Bloody fast. The raptors are the fastest drives around, probably only beaten by solid state memory.

Moving the swapfile to a different drive increases speed, but only when your PC has run out of RAM and actually starts using the swap, can happen when editing huge DV files, but never when you're just browsing the web or writing a word document!

The only drives I regularly defrag are the two raptors, as they constantly get written to and deleted from.

The 400 gigs storage drives don't fragment since I hardly ever delete anything!

If you are worried about disk crashes, the best thing is to use a RAID configuration. If a single drive on the market is big enough for your needs, a simple RAID mirroring configuration with two drives can give some peace of mind. You can of course partition it into several smaller volumes.

Of course, backups are the only sure thing, since you can also lose data due to things other than disk crashes. Fire, theft, viruses, simple mistakes when managing other files, buggy software...

Does NTFS really require defragmentation? I would have expected, with larger drives (more percent free space), that fragmentation would not be a serious concern. There isn't really any defragmentation function on Linux, so I have no recent experience with that...

I am a little bit of a cheap geek and find that on my main (Linux) computer, I prefer to buy three drives and run them in a RAID5 parity mode, using the features of the Linux OS rather than any special RAID disk controller. This gives me a better value because I can buy smaller drives that are often cheaper per megabyte, and I get a bit better performance too. (With a RAID mirror on two drives, you only get the effective space of one drive, whereas with RAID5 on three drives I get the effective space of two drives. In either case, I can replace one failed drive and recover without losing any data.)

If it was me I would have two 500Gb HDDS for data and 100Gb for O/S, office etc...