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hard drive questions


rainbowdemon

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I just bought and installed a new hard drive. Western Digital 100gb. I've always heard it's a good idea to partition larger drives. Why? What would be a good size for the partitions? How do I do this? And finally, why can I only see 93.1gb of the 100?

Thanks!!

:wha':

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well I can give you one answer, you never get the full capacity, you have to have space to enable the recycle bin and transfers, I think, lol I'm sure someone will tell me if I'm wrong. :rolleyes:

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Actually I was talking about that question in a software/hardware integration class in college back a couple of years ago.

What I understand is that 20 gig partitions are optimial for a large hard drive of 100 gb. It seems to go in multiples of 5.

When I had a 20 gigabyte hard drive in my old computer, I had four, 5 gigabyte partitions. It worked well that way.

The logic behind smaller partitions rather than large ones is the fact that the speed of Windows and how it accesses programs depends on "seek time" for data. If the partition is smaller, the seek time is less, therefore your system will be more optimal.

On my current system, I have the Operating system on it's own 10 gig partition, and my data & programs spread out amoungst other partitions.

With faster hard drives and processor speeds these days, people can have bigger and bigger partition sizes, but they aren't always as optimal as they could be.

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ok, well, dunno then, but I have a 40gig external hd, and I'm only able to use 37 gigs, so I assumed the rest was used to enable movement.

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Patitioning also means that if your system goes wrong and needs a reformat ... you only need redo the C drive.... it can be handy if you use a different partition to store your files... nothing lost...

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first of all joe, when it says 100gb it's not true. You always get less like you do in cars. It says 1000hp but it's actually 996hp. By default, the recycle bean is 10%. XP has a built in patrtition tool so you can use that. You can also use Partition Magic which is the same thing. The real thing is that you won't get 100gb but a bit less.

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Joe, if you read the fine print on the box it will tell you a gigabyte is one billion bytes. Your operating system sees a gigabyte as 1024 megs or some such. Years ago hard drive manufacurers used the operating system standard. A 20 gig drive was recognized as 20 gigs. Then one of them started cheating and they all followed to be competitive. I have a 232 gig Maxtor. They call it 250 gig. It sounds better. The hard drive manufacturers are trying to change what has been the industry standard definition of a gig. Windows also sees a megabyte as 1024 kilobytes. A kilobyte is 1024 bytes. It is all based on a power of 2.

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Years ago hard drive manufacurers used the operating system standard. A 20 gig drive was recognized as 20 gigs.

Yeah, I miss the way it was to some degree.

I have an "80 gig" hard drive, but in reality it's only 74 gigs.

The other 6 gigs I could do quite a bit with if they actually were present. ;)

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Yeah, I miss the way it was to some degree.

I have an "80 gig" hard drive, but in reality it's only 74 gigs.

The other 6 gigs I could do quite a bit with if they actually were present. ;)

I agree! My 80 gig drives are 74, my 40 gig drives are 38, my 200 gig drives are 186, my 250 gig drives are 232. When you add up all the drives, I am missing way over 100 gigs. Call the cops!!! I have been robbed!!! Never mind. They won't do shit anyway. I guess I'll have to load up and call a few of my buddies and carpool on overseas to get my payback. :psychofun:

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I just bought and installed a new hard drive. Western Digital 100gb. I've always heard it's a good idea to partition larger drives. Why? What would be a good size for the partitions? How do I do this? And finally, why can I only see 93.1gb of the 100?

Thanks!!

:wha':

If your going to use it to install your os then you should at least have two partions one with a gig or two for the OS and the rest for whatever. Why that is reccomended in case if your OS gets badly damaged you can just format that partition and not lose any of your files on the other partion and do a clean install of the OS.

Other than that people split up their harddrives because thats how they want to orgainize it or to install another os to a different partion.

If you want more hard drive space on that disk then you can turn off system restore for that disk if you want to. You should get at least a couple more gigabytes back but system restore wont restore any files on that hard drive.

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Been kinda lonely and stuck for something to do so I decided to attempt the CompTIA's A+ certification and basically, as far as hard drives go, it's something like this:

A GB is indeed 1024 MB but in order to use any hard drive it needs partitioning primarily and then formatting and it is the formatting process that takes up the difference between stated capacity and actual capacity. Try formatting your drive in dfferent formats and watch the results. A large (upto 137GB) hard drive will lose a massive amount of potential storage if you try and use FAT32 as a file system compared to the new NTFS5 standard. There's a reason for it but I'll spare you the nerdy details (to do with cluster sizes and physical limits of BIOSs/OS file formats)

As for partitioning, you can only have 4 primary partitions per drive, so to use more than 4 partitions you're going to need to take advantage of extended logical partitions and then you start to lose performance as the OS is making the drive actually create partitions within a partition.

If you're aiming for OS performance then the general rule is to create a partition about twice as big as the size of your RAM and make that drive letter function as your swapfile (or 'virtual memory' as Windows terms it). This is exactly what Linux does and it works. As for other partitioning, well, unless you need a different file-system it won't make any difference how you partition it, except for things like specific defragmenting/virus-scanning and other drive-independant actions.

Bear in mind that almost all apps use the registry to function properly - games that use DirectX, for example - so having to reformat the OS's partition will mean that anything installed on another partition will need to be re-installed to make the app work again. I appreciate that it's the same situation if you install these apps on the same partition as the OS, but it's worth noting that partitioning doesn't necessarily solve problems associated with having to re-format.

...isn't this just fascinating stuff ;)

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There is an actual calculation for the missing amount(s). I don't have the time right now but I'll see if I can dig it up today. The 1024 explanation is basicallly the reason. Seeing it drawn out makes it a little easier.

:psychofun:

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