Partitioning a harddrive

[ml57]

NickN's guide says 'never ever partition a hard drive'.  I always have done because I like to be able to reinstall without worrying about my data, and also because I like to have a separate games OS installation that I can keep clean and simple and not pollute with other software. I was even thinking about a third 'starforce' installation for LOMAC.

So just how damaging is it to performance, and are there strategies  to ameliorate the damage?  I can see that it would be bad to have the heads seeking from OS partition to data partition on the same drive, but what about multiple OS partitions on one drive and data on a second?

Mike

[raptorx]

For data storage and backup, partitioning is fine.  I don't know how much it robs from performance for partitioning the OS drive...
but never, never, never the FSX drive (meaning never the OS drive too if that's where FSX is).  And the tweaks work best on a single, unpartitioned OS drive.

We need all the HD speed we can get, period.  Partitioning the FSX drive will slow it down and cause scenery load related stutters.  Put FSX on a 300Gb Vraptor all by itself  (or 2 in RAID w/a card).

-Jim

[ml57]

I wonder why this is: it implies that the mere presence of another partition causes a slowdown whether is is being accessed or not.

Sometimes the intuitively obvious is not!

Mike

[raptorx]

I don't know the reason why specifically, other than maybe something to do with FSX accessing the HD with tons of random I/O calls.